Birdwatching by Iguanana
Birders rejoice! A new bird can be seen every ten seconds, and you need to share your bird knowledge to everyone around before the bird disappears. It's up to you to combine this most mighty of birding experiences with your own proficiency in bird-dom (and typing) to let everyone know just how cool birds are!

How to Play
Type the scientific names for birds as they fly across the sky! Case-insensitive, space-sensitive.

Features
- 24 digitally hand-drawn birbs!
- So many bird facts!!
- A sweet birding bop!
- Latin!
- So much more!

Edit: Updated WebGL version to hopefully crash less!
| Link | https://iguanana.itch.io/birdwatching |
| Link | https://github.com/1guanana/Birdwatching |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/birdwatching |
Ratings
| Overall | 366th | 3.151⭐ | 310🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 417th | 2.762⭐ | 311🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 347th | 3.008⭐ | 310🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 225th | 3.621⭐ | 309🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 209th | 3.539⭐ | 309🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 353th | 2.587⭐ | 305🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 179th | 2.874⭐ | 275🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 254th | 3.193⭐ | 292🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 47🗳️ | 62🗨️ |
Downloaded version works perfectly!
Birds are cute, but I just have no time to WATCH properly!
Well done!
I see that other comments don't understood what to do at first, that wasn't the case for me, seem clear
I'm glad that it work with AZERTY keyboard also
The game crashed on the third retry. Nice chiptune, but too repetitive. Facts are amazing! Birds are gorgeous!
Cool word game and is nicely implemented.
Who knew I would be learning about birds in a game jam!
I did end up taking my headphones off because the music got really drony after a few loops and there was no mute button in game.
Some indication that you had typed the space between the names (maybe an underscore that only appears after you'd done it?) would be good too as that's the main thing that tripped me up.
Too bad that there is not some game over window that would show us how many birds have we watched or how many seconds did we last, so we can compare!
Considering the length of the words compared to the "typing window", having to restart from the beginning after an error, means that it is often not possible to recover from a mistake. Resetting the progress of the word instead of the entire name (or keeping the progress, but ignoring the keypresses) might make the game easier for people who cannot type as fast (perhaps as an easy mode).
Some kind of stat-tracking could have been fun as well, or even just a final end-screen showing all the birds and descriptions that were discovered during the game (to be able to read the descriptions at your own pace).
I liked the graphics of the birds as well as the educational aspects. Especially as those text-bubbles would also show the "easier" every-day name of the birds.
Interesting game!
By the way, my game is also about bird... :)
It would be also cool to add more game mechanics to it, some reactions of the narrator when you fail, stuff like that. But I know it is a compo game, so it is easier to say than to do within those 48h. :sweat_smile:
Simple, little game, and the birbs. I have parrot Pionus Menstruus myself. :bird:
Also that fact about sparrows. Wow, I never knew that! Cigarette butts! Who would have thought!
The typing speed is fine for me, but I suppose I also do type relatively fast. I agree that the resets are annoying though, it would be better to just accept wrong keypresses and allow the user to correct with backspace, or something of the sort - more similar to how real typing works.
I love the fun facts when I succeed typing a name, and the graphics are cute. I find the music a little boring though, not enough variation imo.
I like birds!
BTW it is really hard for me....
I can always appreciate when someone takes the time to create their own music for a jam game. I would have personally picked something more suddle and relaxing but as I said it is always an achievement when you create music for your games on top of everything else!
Great work!
I wish there was a bit of a clearer visual to you typing, it was difficult to understand where I was in the word, especially when I needed to do a space or had just finished a word. Making that a bit clearer is the only improvement I can think of. Good Job!
Very clever idea, but if you put the name only on the bird than at least I know how it looks. Now I known how to type Cortunix cortunix but I don't know how it looks .. ha ha ha .
Good game.
A big issue is that the game doesn't get more difficult over time, so you can end up just typing nonstop until you decide to give up on your own.
Bird.
I could type 100 wpm in vietnamese and 70 wpm in english.
And now i can type 1 bird per 10 seconds.
> birb
Would be nice to have some animations and maybe a better difficulty curve?
It is really cool that you make a game about birds and facts about it.
But I have a few remarks that impact to my gameplay experience((
1. I havent't enough time to read the facts((
2. Typing is really hard specially for people who don't have blind typing skill.
But still cool, I really love it)
The addition of having bird facts between levels is great. Although I wish one had to type those, too.
I wish that it didn't force you to start over on typos. None of the other typing games I know work in this way.
Birds that come from the left are so much harder than from the right, since you have to wait for them to enter the frame completely to see the first letter.
Animating the bird wings would make this game feel amazing, I think. But that's obviously out of scope for LD.
Great idea. Thanks for making it!
Great to learn some interesting facts at the same time!
I was competing with a friend and he complained that I kept getting the "pica pica" :laughing:
- Scientific bird names are long
- Your bird facts are great.
I definitely would've liked some more feedback on if my keystrokes were correct or incorrect, and perhaps a better algorithm for selecting the next bird. I got a lot of repeats. But great entry, very informative and cute! :tada:
feeling like a pyrrhula pyrrhula right now
For me the bad points are: at first it was not clear to me you had to type the space and the music loop is a bit short and gets annoying at some point. Also, a score would have been nice, even with no score board to make the player wants to play more and know if they did better than the previous time.
Overall nice to play, I got hooked ;)
i did enjoy the birdwatching
i would love to have a counter how many did i get right before failing!
It's kind of a shame since the bird drawings are great and the facts about the birds were really interesting, but the gameplay discouraged me from appreciating them.
Awesome art, nice music, a bit repetitive, but it's a really cool idea, thanks!
That birds are awesome, great work!
I found some comedy from the disconnect between peacefully watching birds and furiously trying to type out their names, which seemed like they were made up to purposefully be the bane of my slow fingers.
The art was really great, and it's clear you played into your strengths with that. While I was going to pick on the music, I then saw you describe it as "A sweet birding bop!", and now I must agree.
However, during the gameplay it really seemed like my inputted letters were being dropped, like, way more often than I would expect, given that my keyboard tends to work generally pretty well normally (for example, I typed almost all of this sentence very quickly and without typos).
So, I suspected that perhaps the game was only allowing me to enter a single letter per frame, and from a cursory inspection of the source code it seems like this is true. Now, I'm not entirely sure if I personally can actually type more than 1 letters per frame, so maybe this is all a red herring... but I do think it would be worth changing it. If a player can type two letters in one frame, then the game should definitely let them. (From what I can tell, this is what Unity's Input.inputString is for. But, I don't know for sure as I'm not a Unity user :sweat_smile: )
I do think that rejecting the whole string when the user messes up is actually kind of fun. It is really hard, but I think if the input system was patched as I described, it would be less annoying. One other tweak that would improve it: tell the user which character was wrong when they mess up. If that was added, I think I would actually really enjoy a typing game where I had to be perfect for the whole string.
Overall, I really do love the concept and I had a good time trying to maximize my bird facts, even if I had to try to type very carefully to have the best hope of winning.

You got my 5 ⭐️