BirbDex by Fiordarancio
Sit down and relax with your camera on a beautiful terrace: the sky is full of birds and you're a master at whistling. Just a few notes and they'll come for you to take a picture... it's just a matter of knowing what to sing!
How to play
Follow the birds with the cursor to hear their call.
Try to recreate them by emitting sound sequences with WASD.
Then take a picture with P.
Collect all birds to unlock a secret!
Credits
Programming - HippityHoppity
Art and programming - Fiordarancio
Music and sound design - ste-dtst
Secret sounds - HippityHoppity
Some sfx are based on freesound.org samples. See in game credits for more details.


| Link | https://github.com/Fiordarancio/ludum-dare-58/tree/master |
| itch.io | https://fiordarancio.itch.io/birddex-ludum-dare-58-collector |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/birbdex |
Ratings
| Given | 8🗳️ | 12🗨️ |
I could only whistle like a cockatiel though, no other buttons/combos seemed to make any other noise. How do I mimic the other birds?
It is such a cute way to learn about birds! I immediately started notcing the bird sounds in my neighbourhood after playing the game!
One way to improve could be to give different birds different colors or to keep identified birds standing on the wall.
Really cute concept!
You deserve to know, as a hint, that sequences can be of different length (the cockatiel makes 5 sounds, the Cuckoo 3 and the buzzard 4). The buzzard's call goes up and down twice :wink:
@yibirabbit007 you can use P only after you managed to call a bird on the terrace 😃 and yes, only W,A,S,D can be used to combine sounds for a melody
Unfortunately, the bird was gone before I could take the picture :(
Maybe a small visual cue to guide you through the first few birds would have helped a lot to get a better feel for it.
I did have a lot of problem figuring out the call mini-game, and exactly what the rules were in general. But I managed to snap a couple of photos in the end even though I didn't really know why the birds appeared near me as they did. Or rather, I understand the game logic, I just didn't feel like I was doing anything better or worse with the call imitations when they did.
So there's some feedback there needed for someone like me to grasp and learn from failures in the call attempts.
Very nice looking game though.
Playthrough with more feedback:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUtPgA086e4
However, you could improve the feedback in a few key areas. For instance, the birds all look the same when they are in the air, which makes it difficult to distinguish them. I also noticed that the sounds sometimes stopped unexpectedly, even when I wasn't clicking anywhere else, which made it hard to follow. Furthermore, some visual feedback on the notes/tones would be greatly beneficial, as it's quite challenging to mimic a variety of sounds using only the same four whistling notes. These small improvements would make the core mechanic much clearer and more satisfying to play! But its a really unique game that I truly enjoyed!
That being said, I agree with some of the previous comments. The visual cues might be necessary, because the sounds aren't exactly the same. Maybe it's a hearing issue, but for me it was very difficult to match the sound of anything other than the cuckoo and (miraculously) the buzzard.
Am I correct that the bird voices actually match the ones in nature (disclaimer: I basically live in a cave; I have *seen* birds - I *like* them - but I do not recognize their sounds at all😅), i.e. the game has educational value? If so, even more power to you.
I enjoyed your game. Great idea. Congrats on the entry!
I am the one to blame for the choice and design of bird clues, so I apologize if I've gone a bit too far with the difficulty 😅 I hope that adding some visual feedback in a future release will ease the pain a bit ☺️
@marudziik we've tried to keep things as real as possible: descriptions are tiny snippets from Wikipedia and each call is taken from a real sample which matches the bird or at least is close. I only pitched the clues to (try to) match the whistled notes.