This Game's For the Birds

Ever played Age of Ornothology, from German developer Schadenfreude Interactive? No? You missed what was arguably the best avian realtime strategy game of 2003. The game never got the attention it deserved, so Gamasutra is now hosting a belated postmortem straight from the developer. Developers or aspiring designers with hopes to muscle in on bird-based strategy titles would do well to learn from the lessons of the game's development.

1. AI is hard. Our most recent titles were two auto-racing games (Nazgul Thunder and Cthulhu Karts) and a Battlemech fishing simulator (Steelhead Battalion), none of which had much strategy beyond "veer to the left a bit before a right turn so you can maintain higher speed" and "use the spinnerbait." So naturally, we made a few fledgling mistakes. We didn"t foresee the need for a complex birdseed-scattering algorithm to distribute food evenly, so early versions were plagued with "chicken rushing."