Why Annapurna’s ‘Flock’ Developers Wanted to Make a ‘Really Chill’ Flying Game Where You Literally Can’t Crash Into Anything

Annapurna Interactive set flight with its latest game, “Flock,” on July 16, giving gamers a chance to take the skies and not worry about the ride. That’s because the multiplayer co-op game will not let you, try as you might, hit anything while in flight on your big bird.

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This was a choice made to both keep the cozy game “really chill,” and because “birds don’t constantly crash into things,” according to Richard Hogg — who along with Ricky Haggett and their studio Hollow Ponds (makers of “I Am Dead” and “Wilmot’s Warehouse”). developed “Flock” for Annapurna.

“One exception is windows, big glass buildings, because they just don’t understand them, which is really tragic, actually,” Hogg said. “But mostly birds aren’t able to crash into things. And we thought, maybe that’s what it’s like in this game for you. And maybe the conceit is that you aren’t actually the bird, you’re the little guy riding on the bird and you’re steering that around but the bird has got a mind of its own, and the bird doesn’t want to crash into trees or anything. So you just can’t. If you try really hard to crash into a tree, the bird that you’re riding just overrules that and goes, no, we’re going around it.”

At the heart of “Flock” is a storyline about flying around beautiful landscapes to catalog and collect rare and elusive creatures to add to their flock. So while not the point of the game, taking away a gamer’s choice to crash into something during their exploration is removing a bit of freewill “and making that feel good was a big challenge with this game,” Hogg says.

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Hollow Ponds co-founder Haggett explained the technique used to make “tree-avoiding” feel natural and not like a sudden pivot away from a stationary object was “the equivalent of draping a big invisible blanket over the landscape and building a kind of skate park thing.”

“And then one of our other programmers, Mike Robinson, worked on that for a while, and we got that to the point where it was working pretty well,” Haggett said. “But the tree-avoiding, it’s one of those integral things that you need to feel nice and not mechanical. That was a lot of iterations. And it’s really bound up in the animation of the bird and the movement of the camera. The position of the bird is one thing, but there’s also where the player’s camera is. And when you go from making a 2D game to a 3D game, almost like choreographing, the camera is as important as choreographing the bird and animation. We were working on those things till quite near the end of the game, as well.”

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