Hi, it is I, this is me, the silly bird maker.

It has been about 4 months since the announcement of silly bird sequel and I have, in fact, been working on it this whole time. Occasionally.

Around this time last year I began work on the original silly bird game. I have really come so far. But back to the matter at hand.

I'm trying to complete a prototype of sbs by june. This prototype will feature most of the finalized gameplay and some of the primary levels the player would have to beat to complete the game.

The prototype will not feature finalized (if any) story, art assets, audio, visual effects, endgame content, UI elements and other stuff that you can't really do without but shouldn't prioritize.

Not that much work remains until the prototype's completion, but whether or not I can reach my imaginary goal of June is still up for debate. I am, so far, making the game entirely by myself. Do keep in mind that this prototype will not be public and will be intended for closed alpha testing and other game dev buzzwords I don't really know the meaning of.

During the summer I will work on the graphical aspect of the game. Hopefully my artist friends will have time to help me, but if for some reason they can't help or choose not to, I will probably be able to create the assets by myself. Wouldn't be the first time.

After that, I will work on adding story and endgame content.

Now let's talk specifics. The game. The silly bird sequel. That's the game we're discussing here if you forgot.

With sbs I wanted to take certain aspects of the silly bird original and put more emphasis on them. Original had a story? Make a (slightly) better story. Backtracking? (Try to) Make it a metroidvania. 

The metroidvania part isn't really coming together that well if I'm being honest, it's a bit too linear, but I don't think that's a problem because: 

a) it would overcomplicate the game and

b) once I introduce some secondary endgame content into the mix it might spice the exploration up somewhat.

I tuned the movement to feel better. Coming back to the original sbg1 after sbs feels quite sluggish and hard to control. The movement has been made a lot snappier, faster and more reliable. It has also been made less punishing. Add some new movement options into the palette, and voila - the all new silly bird movement. It is a change that I personally am quite happy with.

The graphics are, as of now, nowhere near finalized. But they have a lot more potential for looking good. Sbg1 was created using Godot 3.5, which was somewhat limited when it comes to graphical fidelity. There were no particle collisions, uniform arrays in shaders, global and per-instance uniforms, compute shaders, directional 2D lights and so much more stuff. The old tile map system was horrible! It was ridiculously limited and unfriendly to use as a developer. Godot 4 fixes all of these issues.

Some of you may remember the jittery camera and overall look of the original sbg1. Still don't know what caused it but I seem to have fixed it with sbs. The camera in sbs works completely differently. It is something I am quite proud of, despite the fact that nobody will care. Still, I think I've done a better job with the camera than a lot of critically acclaimed platformers, like Celeste or hollow knight. Not by a lot, but by a little bit.

The game has no story as of yet. But I have one planned. It is gonna remain silly and will not take itself seriously, but it will have stuff you'd think is kind of important but was still missing from sbg1 - like MOTIVATION, CHARACTERS, and AN ENDING.

It will also feature less 4th wall breaking humor, reference humor, and other kinds of "meta" humor. One game was enough of that stuff for me to realize just how uncool and out of style it really is. Dad jokes are what's on everyone's mind right now.

There's also some shiny new accessibility options and um yeah that's all that's worth mentioning

I would share some screenshots but in all honesty this post is just an afterthought, I'm typing it on my phone and don't have access to any cool prerelease content. So you should just imagine it. Really get the image into your mind. How about that? Looks cool, doesn't it? Fun to play. Yeah, I know.

Anyway, the game is at an early stage of development as of now, but I think it is possible to meet the February 2024 deadline I set for myself.

Thank you for listening. Sozk signing off.