Birdland's Game Development Journey
How It Started
My daughter, Hailey, has always loved drawing. She was five years old at the time, constantly creating new artwork, and one day, full of excitement, she exclaimed, "Let's make a game!" She meant an imaginative play game, but my wife, Krystal, had an even better idea—why not turn Hailey’s drawings into a real video game?
At the time, I was studying at university and had just started experimenting with Unity. The moment we decided to bring Hailey’s artwork to life, her creativity went into overdrive—she started drawing even more, and our imaginations ran wild with possibilities.
Bringing It to Life
With Unity, we transformed Hailey’s hand-drawn sketches into digital assets and began building the game mechanics.
To bring her artwork into the game, I used Photopea to trace and digitize the characters and landscapes, turning them into sprites and other game assets. I then applied what I had learned from a Udemy course to write scripts, develop game logic, and create animations that brought everything to life.
Final Touches
After many, many... "testing" sessions of the game, and adding visual effects, addin the menu screen and made sure everything worked as expected.
We decided the game was finished enough to start showing off to friends and family. We have many more additions to add.. oneday
Or perhaps oneday we will make an entire new game! I cant wait to work on the next project
The Current state - Birdland
I took a few screen shots just to show off what it current looks like
This is the main Birdland scene - The aim of the game is to catch as many birds and collect as many fruits as possible without hitting any spikes or slimes.
Witchland
Witchland was only in very early development, The intention was to have the character throw balls at the witches in the windows while they randomly popup in different places. I was prototyping creating instances of shapes on mouse clicks.
To get something interesting happening I changed the mass and bounciness of the blue ball and made the red balls less mass, added the character and left it at that.
Car race
Car was an interesting to make the car, I used a Ridigbody2D and wheel colliders with WheelJoin2D components and it took a lot of fiddling and parameter pushing. But eventually we got it to the point it is here, Hailey designed and created the track, she added lots of jumps and obstacles.
I think it needed parallax background to give more illusion of movement, particularly because the track is made of solid colours and on long stretches its hard to tell if your moving or not.
Overall though its a fun game and you can make the car do flips while it's airborne, forward and reverse and do jumps.
