Ethan Tucker - Love Birds

Project Overview

Love Birds was the result of my first entry into the Ludum Dare game jam. I was lucky enough to participate in this game jam with a group of Conference Associates from the Game Developers Conference that I had met months prior to the event. The theme for this event was "Delivery" and after a LOT of brainstorming (see the following image) we finally settled on the idea of delivering a letter.

Core Game Concept

This was not just any letter! After discussing a few different ways the player would be writing the letter we decided on MadLibs! This way the player would create the letter as they go and could attempt to get a "better" letter in subsequent playthroughs. Below you can see the empty letter and one example of a filled out letter.

To fill in the MadLibs letter the player would need to fly around the environment to get ~inspiration~ from the world around them. This is where I contributed the most.

My Contributions

I was the level designer for this project. I worked on creating "Pigeon Central Park" and defining all of the items that would be placed in it and where they would go. For our game, this meant not only defining the items in the level but also the words associated with each item. If the player ran into a tree what words could appear in their letter? If they ran into a trash can, should the words be 'worse' quality than if they ran into other items? These are the types of questions that I got to answer. Below you can see an example word list for tree:

Tree

Noun

Positive: fruit

Neutral: leaf

Negative: thorn

Verb

Positive: flourish

Neutral: grow

Negative: wilt

Adjective

Positive: majestic

Neutral: girthy

Negative: decayed

Throughout the project, I worked closely with the artists and writers to ensure that the necessary content for each item in the level layout was completed in time. Then I worked with the programmers to ensure that these pieces of content were pulled into the game corresponding to the correct objects.

Game Demo

If you are interested in trying out the game for yourself, you can do so here! Below is a screen recording of the game if you would rather watch it in action.