Herds of Birds - Strategy game

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Herds of Birds is a strategy game about flightless birds where you build production chains and expand your territory.
You can play solo or with friends, local or online.

Status: technical foundation. UI is temporary, art hardly exists.

Gameplay


You place buildings, connect them with roads and watch your minions carry resources around. Production buildings take in materials to convert them to better materials. By placing specific buildings you expand your territory and lif the fog of war.
Maps are procedurally generated so there is an element of exploration.
Raise an army to defeat your enemies or play together to achieve a common goal.

Visuals

The plan is to sculpt the assets out of clay (irl), paint them and then use photogrammetry to get them into the game. We already made a tech test for that.

This will lean into the whimsical and cartoony.
It should look like the classical stop motion animation.

Tech

This runs on a custom fork of Godot 4.5. Most changes were to the AStar system where I needed to have bitflags on each point to influence the path search.

The networking runs on WebRTC for which I host a signalling server. However since I am strong believer in game preservation, any copy of the game can start up such a server. That way the game can still be played even if we cannot support it anymore.
There is currently no relay server, but that will be added with the games launch.

Who are we

Hello I am Christoph, I started this project and so far did it mostly by myself.
Working on the design is my wife Doris.

Inspiration

The Settlers 2 was obviously a big inspiration. But also Age of Empires and Anno.

Progress

2026-01-17

Making of this post. The important mechanics are in. Multiplayer is working. Save and load is working.

2025-February

I switched to a 4 day work week so I can have a dedicated day where I can focus on the game.

2023-December

Started working on the game in my spare time. Creating the basic building blocks of the game

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Wow! That looks like it is going to be a fantastic game! Very interesting indeed! Congrats on getting this far, and making the models in clay first is going to give them an amazing appearance, full of character. Can’t wait to see what this becomes. Good luck with the rest of it.

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thanks for the kind words :slight_smile:

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I spent the last 2 weeks getting a basic art pipeline into place.
Now I finally have something in godot. Nothing of this is final, and it’s even missing custom LODs but the basics work. This is animated using a vertex animation texture. Exported from Blender into exr.
3600 meshes on screen. Should be more than the game will ever have

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I can’t say enough how this is so pertinent, forward thinking and I wish it was a standardized approach to game development: think of it as an artwork, like a book or movie, that lives on beyond the initial sales.

Bonus points for going the physical claymation route, rather than 3d modelling them in Blender or another software package.

Cheers !

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