Aviary Attorney

A development blog about the hottest bird lawyering game to come out of 1840s France.

[bebetterbop]

“He tried planting a garden like this one, but his black thumb nipped that plan in the bud.”

Based punbird fanart

Play Aviary Attorney. It’s fun, nice to look at, and I particularly love the music choices and use of instrumental stings in dialogue. The writing is also fantastic and stupid funny. PLAY IT.

[aviaryattorney]

We’re live on Steam!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/384630

Aww yis. I’m going to go get some sleep.

[aviaryattorney]

Snazzy new trailer and release date: December 18th!

[aviaryattorney]

Time for an update

It’s been ages since my last Tumblr post. I’ve been meaning to make some write-ups about the development process, but I’ve been too busy developing. Maybe once the game is released, I’ll do a nice write-up on the horribly unintuitive scripting language I'm using.

Progress has been good. Aviary Attorney’s expected release date is the end of this month. We’ll probably have a pre-launch trailer ready by the end of next week.

Today, I’ve been working on redesigning and animating the second client of the game: Juan Querido, the Prince of Spain. He is being tried for murder (of course), and of conspiring to kill the king of France. He also says crazy Spanish words with tildes above the “n”s.

Juan’s theme music is pretty much what you would expect of a suave Spanish fox. Thank you, long-dead composer George Bizet, and currently-living composer Lyndon Holland.

Still got a lot of clean-up work to do before release!

[aviaryattorney]

All hail his majesty, King Louis-Philippe of the House of Orléans, the first of his name, protector of the realm.

[aviaryattorney]

The game’s soundtrack is nearly complete. We uploaded a couple of new tracks to celebrate.

Fun fact: the second piece, Juste Volerti’s theme, is the opening march of Grande Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale by Hector Berlioz. The French government asked Berlioz to write the piece to commemorate the July Revolution of 1830. Berlioz refused, because he wasn’t going to sell out to a government he hated. Then they offered Berlioz 10,000 francs, and he was all like, “give me 2 days and a sheet of manuscript”.

10,000 francs is around $50,000 in today’s money. It’s hard to blame him.

[aviaryattorney]

Please Understand...

Due to Capcom’s recent announcement that they will be producing a dog-focused Ace Attorney game, we feel that the whole animal lawyering genre is getting overcrowded. Consequently, we have decided to shift our game’s genre and theme to unexplored waters.

Introducing: Axolotl Accountancy! Help Alex the Axolotl solve math equations, file taxes, and calculate the culminative equity of small businesses!

[aviaryattorney]

Rezzed Wrap-up

EGX Rezzed came and went. It was a pretty big success. A lot of people played Aviary Attorney, a lot of Exclusive Aviary Attorney Business Cards™ were handed out, and we met a lot of cool journalists, developers, and gamers. We even met three of our Kickstarter backers, which was pretty nerve-wracking (they all liked what they played, thankfully).

The response to the demo was overwhelmingly positive. Players generally realized that it wasn’t their sort of game within the first minute, or they played through to the very end of the demo. Players laughed at the jokes (which was the part I was most worried about), and they all picked up the game’s mechanics very quickly. The demo only had one unexpected bug, and we scrambled to have it fixed by day two of the convention.

Being in the Leftfield Collection meant that we were surrounded by the more unusual games of the convention. Aviary Attorney was sandwiched between Deep, an Oculus Rift game where your real-life breathing affected your in-game movement, and Her Story, an investigative crime game that’s making FMV cool again. The developers for both games turned out to be some pretty awesome people.

However, our favorite game of the Leftfield would have to be Plug and Play. The game is an endless string of blatant sexual innuendos tied together with WarioWare gameplay. It’s... quite something.

Now that it’s over, it’s time to push through with the script writing. I don’t think we’ll have time to attend another convention before release day, but attending something in Summer/Autumn is a possibility. Until then: it’s deving time.

[aviaryattorney]

vvthree said: Ultrawide support?

Some scenes work better than others, but yeah, it generally looks pretty good at that ratio.

[aviaryattorney]

Convention Time - EGX Rezzed

Next week, we will be at EGX Rezzed in London with an exclusive playable demo of Aviary Attorney. Drop by our stand in the Leftfield Collection and say hello!

On the development front, we've spent the last couple of weeks adding features and squashing bugs. Recently, we've:

Made the game safe for all reasonable resolutions.

Added cool zooming effects and general juiciness.

Fixed bugs caused by rapid-fire clicking. I don't know why someone would play a text-heavy adventure game like they would play Mario Party, but you just know someone would.

Revamped the courtroom (see above).

Written a large chunk of the script. The first chapter is pretty much completely implemented.

We've still got a fair bit of work to do before the convention hits. Time to knuckle down...

[aviaryattorney]

I’ve been working with a composer to produce the game’s soundtrack. It’s going well. Here’s a small preview.

[wawaboopboop]

ALRIGHT. I was ignoring this but it keeps coming up on my radar. I definitely recognize the 2nd track, and so does wunderbrot. What is it from??? Is the developer aware that his composer is using pre-existing music???

[aviaryattorney]

Don't worry. I know.

The whole game's soundtrack consists of adaptions and covers of (mostly) French romantic-era music. The above two tracks are adapted from of Camille Saint-Saens' Danse des prêtresses de Dagon, and the lion theme from his famous Carnival of the Animals suite (which you recognized).

We plan on including some pieces from other famous composers like Berlioz and Debussy, but hopefully also some work from lesser-known composers like Leo Delibes and Charles Tournemire.

I am completely distraught to say that Danse Macabre will not be included. I really, really wanted to include it, but no scene in the game required dancing, spooky skeletons, and as such I could not find a place to work it in.

[aviaryattorney]

I've been working with a composer to produce the game's soundtrack. It's going well. Here's a small preview.

[aviaryattorney]

Progress

We've been making lots of little improvements all-round. Mostly fixing up some text problems and implementing persistence between scenes. We've also brought a composer on-board to bring the music to life.

I'll make a few posts about all of this over the next few days, but in the meantime: insult fights.

[aviaryattorney]

The final stretch

The Aviary Attorney Kickstarter only has 20 hours to go. If you were thinking of making a pledge, now might be your last opportunity!

[aviaryattorney]

We're Greenlit!

Aviary Attorney is greenlit! This means that the game will definitely be appearing on Steam once development is complete.

I know some developers are curious about exactly what is required to get through Steam Greenlight, so here's a screenshot of the final statistics:

For some additional context:

We started the Greenlight campaign and the Kickstarter campaign at the same time on the 9th of December. We were greenlit on the 29th.

The game was somewhere between 85% and 95% of the way to the top 100 by the end of the campaign.

The Greenlight description was fairly barebones, and I only made one update clarifying a few details. This leads me to believe that (unsurprisingly) people vote almost entirely based on the video content.

I didn't heavily push the Greenlight page on social media or to games journalists, but I still had a steady stream of voters. This leads me to believe that people were continuously discovering the game through Steam itself. I would guess that less than 10% of the voters came to the page from an external site URL.

I've heard some speculation that this was a fairly large Greenlight batch, and other speculation that this was a regular-sized batch. I don't have any clue either way.

I guess the main take-away from all this data is to:

Have an eye-catching video.

Have a thumbnail that stands out from the other Greenlight games.

Cross-promote to Kickstarter (or other sites) where possible, but link spamming doesn't appear to be necessary.

I hope you all have a good year of developing in 2015!

[aviaryattorney]

Joyeux Noël!

It's well past overdue for an update.

There's pretty big news, if you haven't heard already: Aviary Attorney is fully funded! We hit the 100% mark around a week ago. This means that, assuming there are no disasters, we'll be spending the next five months or so developing the game full-time. So thank you, everybody who made a pledge!

Funding has kept increasing since then (mostly due to a mention in a Kickstarter newsletter), and we're now approaching the first stretch goal. Good stuff.

There isn't too much to report on the development side of things, aside from the inclusion of a couple of new environments, and a little behind the scenes writing.

There should be something more interesting to report over the next week. In the meantime, enjoy the last of the Christmas season!

[aviaryattorney]

Flappy Mouths

We weren't originally planning to add moving mouths, partly because we were afraid it would look goofy (think Canadians from South Park), and partly because we were afraid that it would increase the workload.

But...