How I made PIGEONS

The story of the game developpement and how it was made

DEVLOG

2/15/20244 min read

Everything started in January 2023 when I was working on another big project (pirate pigeons open world game), and it was getting too big so I took a break to create small 3D pigeons to create some gifs or quick animations, but as I was modeling them I thought of making a longer animation with a stylized environnement and funny characters:

But then it became a thing and I started to draw comics about these pigeon knights a few weeks later:

As it became a real project I started to think I could make a small multiplayer videogame out of it with this same stylized look, and our character would be different from the other knights.

The first player model was a pigeon with a kind of helmet or hoodie, which I refined in Marvelous Designer (3D clothes software) to make a true hoodie. That is how Hoodie Pigeon is born.

Then I decided to add a fun little map which was a stone arena in a shape of a pigeon with walls around it (I also changed the player's color to bright blue ).

Then I upgraded the model twice, that is almost the actual version of Hoodie Pigeon:

If you pay attention to the background you can see that he is in a modern building; during this time I thought "wait I could flip the map vertically" so I literally took the map and made it vertical to serve as a reference to the building shaped like a pigeon I was gonna make.

This was supposed to be the background for the animation but I finally imported it into Unreal Engine to replace the old map.

I didn't notice I imported it wrongly so it was 4x the original size of the building, transforming it into a skyscraper of 150m tall.

Instead of sizing it x0.25 I thought "this is fine now it's a pigeon skyscraper" and saw new opportunities to develop the game. At this moment I decided to remove the stylized colorful look of the game with a more realistic modern graphics (still keeping the same pigeon face but everything else became realistic).

These last images were from April 2023, and I started making an entrance for the pigeon skyscraper, removing the other parts for later.

I was still learning Unreal Engine 5 and following tutorials, and started to have an actual workflow from Blender to Unreal Engine 5 (I learned 3D modeling in 2022 so I already knew a lot of things to model the game assets).

This footage is from May 2023, and I made a lot of upgrades to the game.

The ambiance was now totally different form the early developpement and the project was advancing very well. I also made the music we hear in the background (I am at the music conservatory) in Logic Pro and added combat mechanics (I didn't know multiplayer wasn't working at all it was just replicated, there was no server hosting or actual framework).

The developpement was fun and I was learning a lot of things in Unreal Engine 5 while slowly developping a lore for the game. This was maybe the best stage of the making of the game for me.

Then, I decided to add new characters, with a modern look that works well with the environnement.

I started with a pigeon in a gray suit (I lost the screenshot), but it was too generic so I created my own suit design with a pigeon shape for the lapel and modern colors. I named that pigeon billionaire pigeon. His head was too generic too so I changed his eyes and made some concept arts I lost too.

I drew influencer pigeon, a new character multiple times and saw it would be cool to add it into the game - but I was lazy so I waited to make the official poster to actually model 3 other 3D models of pigeons just for them to appear, then I could import them into Unreal Engine 5.

I started to implement a character selection but I was horribly wrong about coding in Unreal Engine so I copy pasted the nodes from one character to another and replacing the references manually (even the animation blueprints )💀

But still, I needed images for the interface so I made individual renders of the pidgeons in Blender:

Now I had a pretty solid game with a coherent universe (remove the part where I didn't know multiplayer would never work on this) and it was already looking good.

Then it was summer break time and I maybe made a mistake by thinking I could expand a bit the map by modeling a 3200 meters high and 2000 meters long pigeon shaped skyscraper in a month which was actually impossible (I thought it would be easy 💀)

August 2023 Footage

The code was getting chaotic and I couldn't handle the game developpement anymore...However, I liked the game ambiance so I kept the same game characters but restarted the game from scratch, updating the models, textures, animations and environnement. It was around September 2023 and back to school time (I just started high school because in France it starts at 15)