1.0.4 - Fixed the feets color on the zebra finch - Removed white marker boxes at corners of rooftop edge ramps - Made minimap indicators larger, added tutorial explaining minimap - Camera can now keep up with you even when you launch off a fan - Lowered default overall volume, for a less ear-exploding first launch - Fixed camera jitter during kickflips (as reported here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/971030/discussions/3/2954915322301164964/ )

Here's the full patch details, but the gist is: Fixed the camera (and some other stuff). 1.0.3 - Significantly improved the gameplay camera, and made it much more stable - Added additional camera angles in create-a-birb - Made it so that if you sequence break to a later level, level select window respects your hustle and lets you go there again even if you didn't beat the prior level - Adjusted "manual" tutorial to be clearer - Added reset bounds for if you manage to fall out of level 4 or 5 - Removed the stub/non-functional "Save GIF" button binding

1.0.2 - Added accessibility toggle for the disabling of depth of field (distance blur) - Added accessibility toggle for the disabling of the vignette / lensing (the black border and slight lens distortion and chromatic aberration) - Made G I B S O N letters in server room slightly easier to collect

First, yes, we're super aware of the camera issues. It's at its worst when you're at the very start, learning the controls and bailing a lot. We missed that because we ran out of dedicated playtesters who hadn't seen/tried the game before (we're an extremely small studio). Sorry! We're on it. That's going to take a bit longer, so in the mean time: 1.0.1 launched last night, and addresses some immediate pain points, chief among them was the tutorial for going fast / getting higher was confusing folks. I added some small but important tweaks that I hope address that, so if you were one of the folks hitting that? Check out the updated Find Big Friend's Charger mission (or flip through How To Skate to the second to last page), and let me know if that helps. 1.0.2 will probably hit next week on around the 21st, and that'll include an accessibility toggle to disable the blur, along with the next sweep of high-priority quick fixes I can stuff in. This will likely also include more camera angles for create-a-birb (so you can clearly see all the clothes/decks). Next one after that will probably be a camera patch, but that one will take a bit longer. The current camera represents how far I was able to take Unity Cinemachine without it shaking itself apart, so the fix is to essentially throw out the camera system and write my own up from entirely bare metal. Totally doable, just takes a bit longer. Anyways, glad folks are enjoying and finding the game. Launch was surprisingly big. We hit the top 10 sellers on Steam there for a bit? Kinda wild! Just stick with us here for a bit while I put out a bunch of the usual post-launch fires and such. Thanks!

This is a smaller release we wanted in ASAP, primarily to address some early issues players hit in the tutorial / learning to gain speed. Also fixed some later-game mission bugs. (And yep, we're working on the camera, that'll just take longer to fix and test) 1.0.1 - Expanded the instructions on how to go faster and higher - Updated "Find Big Friend's Charger" mission to have clearer goal, with better instructions - Added extra platform to make top-of-vent tape in level 3 easier to reach - Moved "Big Friend's Lucky Pin" in level 3 to an easier to reach spot - Missions no longer interrupt the currently-playing music - Improved race gate positions in first mission of level 5

That's kind of it, that's the post. Game's live. Enjoy! Pending seeing if the game is going to bomb or not (which doesn't seem super likely but hey), I'll throw up a roadmap post and all that good stuff. Short version is in the near term, I'll be assembling a patch to address early pain points. Players struggling with a few key skills in the first level, with gaining speed and realizing they need to look around with the camera, being a few of those. Also any actually-critical crashes or whatever that crop up in the near future that can be isolated. But yeah! We're HERE! For now, just ya know, go have fun.

Why? Usual reasons. Shipping a game is hard. Hit some bugs, SDK stuff where the old code worked but the new one suddenly didn't, you get the idea. Gave us more time to polish other stuff though, so that's nice! [previewyoutube=_4aIuu0a4Fw;full][/previewyoutube]

We're putting the demo live a few days in advance of PAX Online, to give folks more time to notice it's there, try it, have fun, etc! We've gotten a lot of "wait the demo was live? and now it's gone again? AAAAAAA" feedback previously, so hopefully this helps. It'll still get pulled down at the end of PAX Online (it ends July 18th), so you've got until around then, but this gives you a few more days. Also. I should probably mention that I didn't integrate the Steam store stuff yet, which means if you copy the game somewhere and just run the exe, it would probably work forever, since I didn't add kill code or anything? Weird. What a weird factoid. Anyways have fun!

SO YEAH! Some stuff happened. I can finally talk about STUFF. First - our release date announce hit. On August 12th, for $19.99 US buckaroos, you can be a skateboarding birb on PC (Steam & Itch), Xbox, Switch, and Luna. Well, unless you're on Game Pass, in which case $0 buckaroos! The trailer went wild on IGN and everywhere else in E3, you probably saw it, but if not, hey check this out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEaCMxJ4Yts Next up, we were in the Wholesome Games showcase! Got to talk a little about accessibility features in the game. You can see that spot over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mw8KzfC1OU Finally, we were in the Limited Run Games showcase, cus we're getting a physical edition! You can watch that right here: https://youtu.be/Xx2Puaa2JKg?t=787 Oh and MUSIC STUFF. So much music stuff: SkateBIRD OST launched! Buy it over here (or Spotify, but hey support our musician!): https://madsenstudios.bandcamp.com/album/skatebird-official-video-game-soundtrack HolyWOW SkateBIRD Album! They just... did a fun little chip album! Yes it's in the game too: https://holywow.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-skatebird Spotify playlist of the We Are The Union / Illicit Nature / Grave Danger tracks from the game? Yeah they put that together too (also please support the groups tho so maybe go buy some merch)! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Blc4XJqT01IsCJqNdsXSG?si=c33241fa00c94a67 ...aaaaand that about covers it! Lining that up was a heck of a lot of work, and now we're neck deep in console submissions, so that's kinda all I've got time to cover today. Still though! WE'RE ALMOST THERE!

Hiya folks! My posts will be a bit thin for the next few months, because hey, remember that SOON. trailer we put out recently for SkateBIRD? We meant it. We're jockeying for slots in E3 to, you know, show y'all something cool, and I'm working on the last bits of work now. We're preparing for TRC/lotcheck submit early next month, and so on. We're HERE. It's exciting! So, here's how I expect this to go, more or less. This month: Just me explaining this, because woof I'm pushing hard for a deadline right now. Though I did meet both my localization deadlines, hooray! I'll get the last batch back in a few weeks, and then that is done too. Next month: maybe some content? maybe a tease? Hopefully at least a "I HAVE SUBMITTED TO TRCs AND NOW I AM TIRED" ramble. June: I think I know of at least one thing happening that we can talk about after the fact. Other things may bubble up after that. This is where stuff starts to get MYSTERIOUS, though. Gasp. Who can say. ... and beyond that is unknowable and I can talk more about it after more things happen, but hey! Now you know where things stand right now.

So! Last month we did the big demo, and that went great! Using wishlists as the metric always feels weird, but comparing this festival VS our last one, it seems like folks really dug it. Seems like we're hitting the bar we need to for release. WHICH IS GOOD, because gosh we're getting close. Anywho, what's been happening... if you want SkateBIRD in your Animal Crossing, you can use that code (thanks kai!). We added balloons, because of course we did. Also quail, with the lil dingle-bopper, and we started experimenting with cute bird-toy grindables. You won't see these in the first bedroom though, we're saving 'em for the last level. Speaking of levels, much of not-working-on-the-demo time here has been working on the first level. It's very different from the Bedroom we demoed before, though we incorporated a lot of what made it cool. Just had to clean it up a lot, make sense of what was there (ping-pong table instead of Weird Giant Wooden Floor Table Thing), etc. The rest of the time was working on the last level, which has a KITCHEN. Yes you can skate that sink, and the rest of the counter, and a bunch more that isn't shown yet. The level got uh. Fancy. Once I finish this, I'm going to start putting the missions into the first level, and the next week I should be mission'ing the last level, and then: WE'RE CONTENT COMPLETE. Doesn't mean the game will be done then, but so close. So very, very close. 'Til next month!

This is TIME LIMITED, so don't wait too long. The event ends Feb 9th at 10am, and the demo gets pulled back down. That's next Tuesday! So you got through this weekend to give it a try. It's a very, very different demo from what we had up before. Different level, a year's worth of control refinements, actual story, etc etc. This is close to what we'll be launching. Like this is literally just the second level of the game. All the plot missions. I'm sure we'll touch up stuff between now and then, but this is just - level 2, cut out, turned into a demo. Huzzah! You'll find the demo here (or you could just, you know, click over to the store page since you're probably in the Steam client already, heh): https://store.steampowered.com/app/971030/SkateBIRD/ Enjoy!

Had a request I do more of these, so here ya go, more updates! The couple I didn't post over here amounted to: I did a metric ton of tightening on play feel, tons of work on NPCs and quests and stuff, finished the server room level, and now, (as usual, all these links are over to twitter videos or the like, that I threw up as I was working) I finished ANOTHER level. Office! You might remember some of the geometry from waaay back years ago, in one of the demos we released. It's also in the Nintendo trailer. The map is quite a bit evolved from that, though. Very significantly evolved. What we did is kind of plonk the old Office level down in the middle of a much larger, Bedroom-sized space, and went... well, ok, how can we make this not suck. I started by widening the desk area by about 1.5x, and then rebuilding the back wall so that you can go back and forth through it, making it all one giant skateable space with just enough division to make it feel distinct. Then we drew the rest of the owl, as it were. Went big, added a CEO office, did some cool stuff on top of that waaaay up high, figured out how to make much cooler desks with cool stuff to do on them, we even added a cool vent-based access route to the next level (and a whole series of missions to set it up). Not sure if every level will have a load zone directly into the next one, but maybe? It's pretty cool. That in the can, I moved on to the next level in the pipe... rooftops! (and that'll be the work for this month) I think that's about it? We're rolling into launch year now, so we'll be gradually stepping up with some announcements. Might have a thing happening next month. No it isn't the game launch, but, you'll probably like it anyways :D

We're making SkateBIRD decks (like actual skateable skateboard decks, not just decorations), and they're pretty slick! We partnered with DJSkate to get these made, and you can pre-order them over here: https://djskate.com/

Think of the Summer Game Festival build as one big SkateBIRD playtest. That means it's super stripped down VS the final game, focused on sandbox play, and we've put a handful of little missions in there to hint at how story mode will work. Also you know, tons of bugs. It's pretty similar control-wise to the last demo in December, but in a more open level and with a slightly different camera - and we'll leave it intentionally vague past that. We're isolating some specific changes (and not entirely explaining what changed) so we can see how folks respond.

I'll be working as I usually do, with our Discord open, and you can TYPE WORDS AT ME! I might even respond, if they are not bad words. No extra credit for bad words. The Discord is RIGHT HERE: https://discord.com/invite/CdPgqWg I am legally unable to give you extra credit at your university, but I'm certain if you print the chatlog out and show your art professor the interaction, they'll at least smile. You can tell them to tweet at me for confirmation that you attended my, uh. Gallery show? Tell them it's like a gallery show where nobody has to wear pants.

We're streaming for the Summer Game Festival! Expect the following:

• Playing the latest build, just tooting around having fun.
• Answering questions I get in chat
• Demonstrating how bad I am at playing while reading chat
• Likely tons of bugs
• Maybe the stream will even crash!

We got lilac breasted rollers in, and downy woodpeckers too, so that's cool. This month also saw the beginning of a new level, the office! It's pretty neat, has some killer lines, it's got a second side with a bowl that you have to ramp up and over to access. I'm of course decorating it in appropriate art, and it's generally looking pretty cool aside from that big dumb blue ramp I gotta replace with something more appropriate. We also showed (and were revealed as a Game Pass day 1 game) at X019, so THAT was fun. BTW no that doesn't mean we're Xbox exclusive... more on that later. We also showed at Day Of The Devs! Oh and birb learned to dab, apparently. Still can't floss tho, sorry :( Also, if you missed it, we did the stand-alone birb dress-up game SkateBIRD x Jazz Mickle's Pro Cap Wearer Do A Spoopy Combo. It's pretty neato! Also functions as a test of the customization system we'll be integrating into the main came, so it was double-handy.

We've got a SkateBIRD goody for you. One last dose of spoopy before Santa hat time. We give you: SkateBIRD x JAZZ MICKLE's Pro Cap Wearer do a Spoopy Combo!. It's free / pay-what-you-want, and all donations go directly to Jazz Mickle (the dev building our birb customization system). This is just a fun cross-over between our game and hers! It is literally just a birb dress-up game. You can put birbs in hats. Seriously.
If you've never seen them before, the Jazz Mickle Pro Cap Wearer series (there's two!) is a tongue-in-cheek send off of a... particular skating franchise... that asks an important question: but what about the folks who just want to sit around the skatepark wearing cool hats, and generally looking cool.
At last, the same experience is open to birbs who can't really skate, but really wanna hang around the cardboard park with skatebirbs and just look cool in some hats. You could be that birb. RIGHT NOW! Practically speaking, this is a stand-alone demo for how SkateBIRD's clothing customization will work. Over the next while here, we'll add the other clothing types (glasses, belts, etc) to this freebie, and eventually cap it off with an outfit export system so you can customize your birb in SkateBIRD x Jazz Mickle's Pro Cap Wearer, then import exactly that birb into the final SkateBIRD game! So anyways, go have fun dressing up some birbs!

Hola folks! Just an update as to what we've been working on lately. As per usual, most of the links are gameplay videos. Birb's done a lot this month. We tried fitting them for a squashy vest, but weren't 100% with how it felt. We may revisit this later, or just skip vests in favor of belt-type objects - because belt-type clothing is super cute and work great. We also integrated our first set of branded merch! If you remember, we're working with DJ Skate to put their stuff in-game, so we built some hats that mirror actual hats they sell. We're also of course working on new levels now. For some reason birb is exploring an office? Oh god they found the stairs. Oh and we were at EGX! We were there as part of the Leftfield Collection! It was cool! The booth was apparently packed enough that some press folks went home never having gotten to play it, which is sad but also cool? Glad people liked it, anyways!
We even made some best-of lists for games at EGX! Both from NME, and Rock Paper Shotgun. Yay! That's about it, though... there's something spoopy on the horizon. More on that, uh, next week probably.

September Dev Update Just gonna quickly go over the stuff we've been working on, and show you some pretty pictures. If you're a Mac gamer and care about that specifically, just scroll to the bottom. (all the links here are video tweets and the like) Kookaburra are now in-game to go with the Kakapo, so that's neat! Birb tried to escape (gasp). Also got Budgies in the game, and Pigeons finally. Most of the work this month has centered around the whole VHS tape system, and getting scenes working in it. That work is largely done, though now I'm expanding it to do more. Right now I can have a basic scene that loads in some birbs and plays dialog, but I want stuff like being able to focus the camera on the speaker, or have the dialog appear in such a way as to make it easier to tell who's talking, that kinda stuff. The other big chunk of work was birb customization. Added some glasses, got physical clothing working and made a cute scarf that blows in the breeze, and now we're trying to figure out how to make hoodies and vests work, or if they should be in the game at all. Right now we're leaning too-weird-to-use. Mac Build Stuff Mac OS 10.15 and beyond is doing weird stuff with Gatekeeper which may complicate running the Mac build of SkateBIRD. We're not likely to sign our build with Apple for a bunch of reasons, but as far as we can tell, you'll still be able to run things by just disabling Gatekeeper or telling it to ignore apps. We directly tested this, just a week or two ago. We're still about a year from SkateBIRD launch, though, and the new Mac OS isn't even properly out of beta yet, so it's all up in the air how this will look even 6 months from now. We'll keep you updated with how it's all going to work, whenever Apple and Valve stabilize with how they're going to handle it. This is a problem hitting literally everyone that does Mac app development right now, with games a tiny part of that, so it's likely a solution will present itself. It would seem strange if, for instance, a cloud build solution didn't pop up that could fully sign et al your builds. Enterprises need that just to operate, and tiny game studios could hop on their coat tails and use the same pipeline.

• Explore lots of bird-sized parks, with simple controls familiar to any pro skating tiny hawk.
  
• Find fancy clothing, secret mixtapes of new music, birds that need your help, and more!
  
• Skate to an original low-fi birb-hop soundtrack - or drop in your own mp3s!

• OS: Ubuntu 16.04 or higher
• Processor: Intel 3rd generation Core (ie. Core i7-3770) (or equivalent)Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Graphics: Intel HD 4000
• Storage: 500 MB available space