The Pipe Network 🍝
Star Birds is a cozy factory builder. You place buildings across an asteroid and connect them with pipes. The pipes have an iconic transparent look, and the drawing mechanic is free-handed - just like drawing with a brush, married with the elegance of dragging a garden hose around.
Bye to the Rigid Grid: Go with the Flow 🧶
When you develop a factory builder, one central question is: How do you get raw materials from one building to the next? At the beginning, we considered having conveyor belts. However, a rigid building grid did not feel wholesome, so we decided for flexible pipes instead. We sifted through the wonderful content library of our project partner kurzgesagt - in a nutshell to find style inspiration, and created some concept art of our vision. Smoothly moving goods, soft curves and rich, vibrant colors.
above: early Star birds Concept Art, still using conveyor belts
above: later Concept Art with UI Design explorations and pipes only
Transparent Pipes and Connector Designs 🔌
We decided on a transparent pipe material to clearly show the flow and direction of the pipe contents. This makes it easier for the player to navigate the overall production system.
Ever been to a country with a different socket type than the one you are used to? Now imagine that situation in space. We neede to find a solution and prototyped different building connectors, carefully assessing their shape langauge and color, and tested feedback effects like rotating rings and flashing signal lights on the building itself. We ended up with a minimalistic connector design only on the pipe end, and a universal input-output ring on the buildings base. This makes it easy to quickly spot the connectors, grab and drag them, to ultimately connect them to a buildings IO-ring and ensure that your production network is running smoothly.
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Free-Handed Pipe Dragging: Creativity Meets Strategy 🎨
The last and most important step was to make the gameplay feel wholesome and satisfying. We developed a free-handed pipe drawing mechanic, resulting in smooth curved paths like lines drawn with a brush. It' super easy to do, and feels a bit like dragging around a garden hose. We wanted it to feel espacially satisfying to interact with the irregular 3D asteroid surfaces while constructing your creations.
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Star Birds is an indie project by Toukana Interactive and kurzgesagt. We are over the moon to have such an amazing community. You are the reason why this project exists. If you want to support us, Wishlist the game here on Steam, and tell your bird friends about it.
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Have a great holiday everyone 🎁
Your Toukana Interactive Team
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