Alison Huang is concise but effective in Broken Bird (Spread Your Wings)
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
Broken Bird (Spread Your Wings) is all killer, no filler — it’s a 10-minute adventure where you play a bird that’s helping another bird to survive. It’s sweet but not saccharine, and a little dark but not bleak, with charming chunky pixel art in saturated colors. Alison made appropriately quick work of my interview questions!
How long have you been making games?
Since 2015!
What tools do you like to use?
Mostly Ren’py and Twine, though Broken Bird (Spread Your Wings) was made in Unity.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I tend to explore being marginalised in a way that doesn’t shy away from harsh realities, but also at the same time avoids getting too dark or detailed about that stuff.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
My favorite aspect is probably watching a game come together and form a playable experience, unfortunately that often requires my last favorite aspect: getting the programming to work.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Probably Disco Elysium? People love to retweet emotional quotes from that game and they’re right to.
Broken Bird (Spread Your Wings) is a short narrative adventure. Why did you decide to make it?
I’d made it for Rainbow Jam 2021, and it’s become a yearly tradition since 2017 for me to make a short narrative story in Unity for that game jam. The theme for that jam was Liberation, and after some brainstorming decided to go in a bird motif direction.
This game competes with “the first five minutes of Up” in terms of emotional punch. What was it like writing it?
Thank you, that’s a very sweet compliment! It’s the kind of narrative that really fits in my wheelhouse of real but not dark writing that I mentioned earlier. I just have to get in the right headspace (which is another reason why I don’t write super dark stuff) and go. I will admit I did get pretty emotional multiple times while writing it.
The flights, where you dodge obstacles, are something a little different for a narrative game. How was it to make those?
Programming mostly haha. It’s basically a three lane endless runner but finite, so it was just a matter of finding tutorials and such.
You make TTRPGs as well — what is shared or different in the two crafts for you?
The underlying game design mostly. Video games and TTRPGs have different needs, but they both require figuring out how a certain design intent is expressed mechanically, whether that be through code or dice.
Most importantly . . . Do you have a favorite bird? What kind would you be?
There’s so many cool birds, I couldn’t possibly choose.
