Mini-Devlog #5: Development History

Giannis here and with the November 18th release of BIRDCAGE fast-approaching, Barry and I would like to take a look back on the development history of our sword action shooting game.

THE ORIGIN

The concept of a shoot ‘em up called “BIRDCAGE” can be traced all the way back to 2017. At the time I had started prototyping a shooter as a way to learn the GameMaker engine and although this project faltered, a few core elements would carry over to the future iterations of BIRDCAGE:

The player ship would have a sword, the player’s shot color would be blue, the game would be “vertizontal”, the title would be BIRDCAGE, the aesthetic would carry a 32-bit era influence.

Around this same time our correspondence with Barry had started over DM’s on Twitter. It was obvious that we shared common influences and tastes, and finding something to work on together became an oft-repeated goal of ours.

POLYGON BIRD

Over the next few years, I would dabble in game development as a hobby. I learned a lot by working on a few different prototypes, slowly building an understanding of what making a game might be like. Around 2021-2022, I started to feel confident enough to take game dev more seriously.

The BIRDCAGE idea was revisited in September of 2022. It was meant to be a quick learning project that would be finished within six months.

Steam post image BIRDCAGE prototype from 2022.

Within days of getting the basics of BIRDCAGE down, Barry and I started collaborating on the project. At first, Barry was mainly going to compose some early stage music, but it soon became obvious that we shared a common vision, work ethic, interests and design goals. We decided to set off on full production of BIRDCAGE as partners and co-directors, and POLYGON BIRD Games was born.

Steam post image Logos for POLYGON BIRD Games and EXCEL Framework, the name given to our set of tools within GameMaker.

DEMO ZERO

Our first major milestone came in March of 2023 with “DEMO ZERO”, essentially a polished prototype that we sent out to friends and family to play and gauge their reactions. At this point, the game was pretty rough, but the essential core of BIRDCAGE had been established. And, with the positive reaction of early playtesters, we set out to flesh out what the full game would be.

Steam post image Early version of the - BIRDCAGE Demo Zero- title screen (late 2022).

Steam post image The boss fight against THESIS as it appeared in Demo Zero (2023).

THE DARK AGES

Early 2023 to late summer of 2024 was, I think, the most agonizing part of development on BIRDCAGE for me. We had the base of the game, and now we needed to add the content, which turned out to be more of a grind than I had anticipated. The relative monotony of the grind led me to a variety of dangerous thoughts: “What if we added this or that weapon? What if we changed the aspect ratio of the game? What if the graphical style was completely redone?”

The fact that BIRDCAGE made it past this stage is definitely owed to Barry’s involvement – having a collaborator who was as invested in the game as I was and believed in the project when I didn’t was crucial.

I don’t remember too many specifics from this time – all I know is that we came out the other side with the "minimum viable product" content of the game in a relatively stable and polished state.

Thankfully, things would improve considerably in the next stretch of development.

THE BLESSING OF ZORBA 🥚

Toward the end of August 2024 and after some time off, we started firing on all cylinders.

The majority of the game was playable and polished, and over the years of constantly replaying the game, we had developed an intuitive understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and how far we could push certain elements. Stages 5, 6 and 6b were developed at this time and earlier stages were polished to tie the whole together.

A lot of fun work happened over the next months – figuring out the final difficulty curve, balancing the density of the experience, writing in-game dialogues and lore, directing the cutscenes, polishing the assets and code, adding more options, menus, explainers and tutorials. The final year was a time of rapid progress, every little task making the finish line a little clearer ahead.

Steam post image Stage Select Training menu, an example of the kind of work that took place in the final year of BIRDCAGE development (2024).

First pass at adding Local Leaderboards to the game (2024).

FINAL STRETCH

That brings us roughly to today, a couple of weeks out from the release of BIRDCAGE. The past few months have been a lot more business-oriented, trying to get word out about the game, cutting trailers, creating the Demo for Tokyo Game Show and NextFest, polishing marketing assets and playing whack-a-mole with any remaining bugs.

Now felt like a good time to look back on the history of the project and take stock of the process. We hope it gives you some insight into how BIRDCAGE came to be.

We’re extremely proud of the game we’ve made and how we made it. Even after what must be thousands of hours of testing, it’s still fun for us to just fire the game up and play through BIRDCAGE, trying to perfect our routes and scores.

We hope you’ll enjoy playing BIRDCAGE as well!

Thanks for reading,

Giannis and Barry

POLYGON BIRD Games