Pie in the Sky: Aussie-made 'magpie mayhem' game interview
ACM chats with the indie developer behind Pie in the Sky - an old-school, action arcade game where you play as a classic Aussie magpie stealing food, swooping people and completing objectives to rack up a high score and cause as much chaos as possible!
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00:00I saw a magpie and I thought about the times I've been swooped by a magpie and I've got a couple of
00:05young kids and they've experienced it already. Yeah, I just thought, oh I wonder if anyone's
00:09made a game about that because that's, you know, a pretty iconic Australian experience.
00:23But yeah, if I was to describe it to someone I'd say that it's a retro style old school
00:29action arcade game where you play as an Australian magpie,
00:34sweeping people, completing objectives and trying to rack up a high score.
00:39I noticed that the the graphical style is sort of intentionally modelled after
00:43sort of those early Tony Hawk games on like PlayStation 2 and that sort of thing. Is it
00:50tricky to like try to nail that specific aesthetic? I noticed on a recent TikTok you did the
00:55frame blending motion blur that was common on the PlayStation 2.
01:02Is it harder to go for a specific older style versus more realism? With the PS2
01:09it's a little bit difficult because there's certain things that the PlayStation 2
01:15did that modern software and at least the base software of the engine I'm using which is Unity
01:22doesn't really work the same way. So it's a little bit tricky but if you do enough research
01:31and watch enough, you know, videos of PlayStation 2 games you can sort of emulate it. The difficulties
01:37of making it look like a PS2 game are definitely outweighed by the benefits of it looking like a
01:43PS2 game in that I can keep the the polygon counts low which not only saves me development
01:49time when I'm 3D modeling but also when it comes to porting the game on mobile or making sure it
01:55runs well on Switch or Steam Deck. The optimization is already sort of built in. I'm not going to have
02:00to reduce the quality and yeah it's an interesting balance as well because the game
02:06technically that it's probably doing some things that the PlayStation 2 couldn't do but I've always
02:12sort of gone by the the mentality that you should emulate what people remember
02:17the console looking like, not necessarily exactly what the console looks like.
02:29I guess Australia as a whole I think in the last few years maybe 5-10 years Australia's
02:33really emerged as like a really cool place for a lot of interesting indies to come out of with
02:39a lot of success. Yeah so there is a lot of other solo developers here.
02:48I try to make sure that I keep in touch with a lot of the game development community here
02:53and we have a really good supportive community here like we have a big community
02:59discord group where anyone posts issues that they're having with their game or updates
03:05to get feedback so the community is really great and yeah there's a lot of developers in Perth as
03:12I said not many bigger studios but in terms of solo developers like myself and two and three
03:17person teams there's actually a lot going on in WL and you know where the community is really good
03:23where it's sort of a we're all in it together sort of feeling not we're all against each other.
03:28What has the feedback been like from people so far? Yeah the feedback's been great it's
03:32definitely the sort of game that lends itself well to player feedback and input so
03:39especially with a lot of the like leaning on the Australian culture and iconic Australian
03:46things so I'll get a lot of definitely my main audience is people in Australia because I get a
03:51lot of those references and so the response has been yeah a lot of people have great ideas for
03:57oh you should have you know esches smoking vapes in it and you should have you know tradies
04:03with meat pies and because it's sort of a sandboxy sort of game a lot of people can
04:10suggest a lot of ideas or even names for combos and attacks and level ideas you know things to
04:17feature in the levels so in terms of that engagement it's been really good.
04:29This is a piece of advice you could offer any other developers out there or someone
04:34thinking about making their own game what would it be? My advice to other developers
04:41particularly solo developers or small teams is just get it done. The lessons you learn
04:48particularly in the last say 10% of a game's production where you're getting screenshots
04:55you're making sure everything works properly you're making sure save files work correctly
05:01getting materials ready to upload to a steam page stuff like that the lessons you learn in that
05:06actual release area are really really valuable and crucial and not to be a perfectionist you know
05:15if it works it works and I know that there's a lot of programmers that are much better than me
05:21that are going to cringe at hearing this but as long as the person playing the game is experiencing
05:26it how they want to experience whatever's going on behind the scenes doesn't matter if you have
05:31to take some shortcuts or you write some code that you're not super happy with but you get a
05:36product out the door that's way better than perfecting over and over again and never actually
05:41releasing anything and and the lessons you'll learn from that project you can then apply to
05:47your next one but you're not going to be able to show anyone any of your work if you never actually
05:53finish it so yeah don't be a perfectionist