I know, I know, it’s been so soon since the last one’s been released, but I now have a new game-like thing up for download! It’s called “Pigeons in the Park”, and it essentially consists of two strangers having a conversation on a park bench. It’s very short, along the lines of “When We Were Kids”, but completely puzzleless. And it’s incredibly cute, if I do say so myself. Download!

Even though I wrote this game in under a month, there’s a bit of a history behind it. The characters were originally created sometime last year for a project I was working on with my good buddy Rikard “Trumgottist” Peterson; we both wanted to expand our horizons and learn to do a game in full 3D, pretty much from scratch using the Ogre engine. So, around that time, I came up with the idea of an adventure game based on two people talking about their lives in a coffee shop, and Rikard sent me the IF game Best of Three, which pretty much actually is a game based on two people talking about their lives in a coffee shop. Needless to say, though, I was fascinated by the exploratory, puzzleless approach it took, and thought it’d be cool if we did something similar, but with graphics and a silly song-and-dance routine. 3D in particular would have been perfect, as the possibilities when it came to playing around with camera angles and facial animations would make for a nice cinematic touch.

Sadly, since both of us started getting busy and had very little experience with making games in 3D, we wound up bailing on the project as it stood, so I took the concept, rewrote it, changed the location to a park bench, and scripted the whole thing in 2D in the Wintermute engine. It doesn’t have the changing camera angles, facial animations, or song-and-dance routine, but at least I got the general design idea out there in some kind of concrete form. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll do another, improved version of a conversational game, provided I figure out something reasonably interesting for my characters to talk about.