Birdtown Update! (June 2025)

Hey everyone! Trying out a quick itch.io devlog to track changes to Birdtown over time

New update (v1.09) is live with a bunch of changes I've been developing over the last 3 months:

• 2 new game modes, including a team-based mode Protect the VIP where one player is nominated as a VIP, gets a shiny Golden Gun, and must coordinate with their team to assassinate the opposing team's VIP.
  • A 3rd game mode Team Deathmatch is also available and ready, but it hasn't really been playtested yet. Kind of got released on accident lol
• Migrated from using the public peerjs server to my own server which runs some additional custom code on top of peerjs server code. This allows anyone to host public games that anyone in the world can join, and enables the new server browser (though there are usually no public games available anyway 😂)
  • This was a fun foray into writing more server code and hacking around to extend peerjs server functionality without modifying the underlying code
• Proximity voice chat is also back! This feature was disabled since I wasn't too happy with it before, but I thought it'd be great for the new Protect the VIP mode, even in its kinda scuffed state. Right now you also can hear anyone's voice chat, even if they're on the opposing team, provided they're close enough.
• Settings are now saved and loaded automatically. Since this is a web game, they're just written to a cookie. So settings are not transferred across different devices or even incognito sessions. There's no tracking and I intend to keep it that way.
• Spent a bunch of time experimenting with various things to improve game feel/juice. Now we have new reload animations and it's much more obvious when you take damage (including a screen shake you can turn off in settings). Added some more sounds to things that didn't sound right or were weirdly silent.
• Added some billboard art featuring various birds you can play as. They now have a bit more personality aside from their squawking (we have a realtor, an athlete, a techbro, and a screamer).
  • Hope to add more bird types and billboard art since I personally feel like it adds a lot to the world
• Spent an inordinate time on polishing various UI things. 
  • This always takes way more time than I feel is reasonable, but it is super important (especially for a web game) that the UI is as frictionless as possible. 
  • One neat thing is clients can now browse game modes and request to play specific modes.
• Some gameplay/balance tweaks.
  • Not a lot, but I adjusted some of the cooldowns & weapon recoils based on feedback and based on "game juice."

Future Ideas - these are what I want to accomplish, approximately listed in order of importance.

• Launch on Steam & Discord
• Try implementing some high effort experimental game mode
  • I think it'd be really fun to play some variant of Mafia/Among Us using the proximity voice chat.
  • Also been playing around with a system that allows you to add buffs to your bird/weapons. Think this would be great for a souped up Duel or Free for All mode where you select various buffs as the rounds go on. Also wanted to make a co-op PvE mode where you fight progressively stronger bosses & build your character as you go along (this would also help with the conundrum of having no singleplayer content!)
• More content in general (bird types, more weapons + equips)
• Another map with different objects, so it's not just buildings everywhere, all the time