Storks, games and pigeons

A few weeks ago, I spotted a US government spy drone pigeon trying to build a nest on my balcony. Personally, I don’t really mind these flying rats as long as they keep their distance, but this one really crossed the line. I threw away these few sticks it managed to gather.

I thought it’s an interesting coincidence that a bird decided to build its nest at our unofficial office, because we sometimes call it the Stork’Nest. This inspired me to write a short post about the history of our team’s name, some of our older projects and the Stork’Nest itself. Also, the real nest and the pigeon will be back - these creatures are really stubborn.

Stork’Studios

The bird in the name of our team comes from the first project we created back in high school - Stork’Man. It is a platform game about a superhero saving the world from an alien invasion. The whole game was written from scratch in C++. The project was a playground that helped us learn a thing or two about programming and game design.

After some time of working on Stork’Man, we realized that the game will be very hard to finish. The graphics library we used didn’t support all the stuff we wanted to add. Systems of the game, like custom skeletal animation engine and level management were pretty clumsy to work with. In order to get the job done, we would have to rewrite everything. This is what happens when you make your first game on a custom engine without prior experience.

We decided to stop working on Stork’Man and do something else. The game is unfinished, but it’s kinda playable. You can roam around the level and complete some platforming challenges, but there is no actual goal. You also cannot lose, which makes sense, as the Stork’Man never loses or something. Source code of the game is available on GitHub, but there are no executables. You can build it yourself if you really want to, but I’m pretty sure there are better ways of spending an evening.

Nevertheless, this project was a great learning opportunity and we had a lot of fun creating it. I like to think we will create a game about our hero in the future, but now we focus on other projects.

Other projects

We realized we have to choose whether we want make a game or an engine.

Then we decided to stop inventing and use Unity. After some small learning projects we stared working on Kappa Square. The plan was to create an FPS in space. Players could move around freely in 3D space using a jetpack and fight enemies in a dynamic environment full of asteroids, spaceships and explosions.

After developing and playtesting the first bigger playable demo, we realized that movement in three axes is a bit confusing and the general experience is quite odd. On the other hand, the game itself was pretty fun to play, or could have been after some polishing.

In the meantime we took part in many game jams. On one of them we began creating a game called Bullet Waste (rings a bell?). We fell in love with this concept, so the development of Square Kappa was halted as we decided to focus on the new project.

Fun fact: Bullet Waste takes place in the same universe as Kappa Square.

Stork’Nest

Our team consists of students. We don’t have a real office, so we meet every Saturday at a flat, which happens to be the place where Adam and I live. We call the place Stork’Nest. Why? As a programmer, I never leave my room, but I’ve read on the internet that stork is a “bird” and the things live in something called a “nest”. I couldn’t check whether or not this claim is real, but it sounds legit.

Pigeon’Nest

Ok, back to reality. A few days after removing sticks from the balcony, I looked through the window. What I saw was the same pigeon sitting on something which seemed to be the worst nest I’ve ever seen. Just a few sticks randomly placed on the floor. I wanted to throw it away again, but there was an egg lying between the sticks. Now that was a problem. I learned that destroying bird’s nest with eggs is actually illegal in our country, so at the moment it have to stay - we have an actual nest in the Stork’Nest.

Look at this marvelous creature

Thanks for reading. We will come back with some Bullet Waste related content soon, I promise.

Andrzej “Pojemnik” Gauza