FLOCKED & LOADED - Devlog

Arcade Game Design
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Hello there!

So uhm, you’ve probably (hopefully) seen the new game jam overtaking the forums:

Yeah….
And maybe, just maybe… you’ve heard of the upcoming GTA6, and it’s long awaited release.

So why not piggyback off of it, and make a knockoff, family friendly, pigeon-based GTA?
what could possibly go wrong?

And that brings us to our game: Flocked & Loaded!
(Apparently there’s a game titled ‘Flocked and Loaded’ on steam… but shhhhhhhh)

Alrighty. Enough yapping.
You probably wanna see some gameplay!
Hopefully.

Ver - 0.1
[Very early test]
Untitled design
(^ Really old prototype for the pigeon animation and controls)
Looks pretty ugly. Yeah. I agree.

Ver - 0.4
[WOW! Traffic! Sorta. And updated map as well!]
Microsoft MakeCode Arcade and 24 more pages - Personal - Microsoft_ Edge 2026-10-21 17-13-32
(^ A* Pathfinding cars that drive on the right side of the road (torn between making them drive on the left, or the right side.. or maybe down the middle :D))
They don’t really care about driving directly through each other.. :(

That’s all I have so far, and I figured you’re probably thinking ‘Wow! This person is a genius, and I really want to play this!’

Well, you’re in luck (subjectively).

And now, I’m nearing the end of my post… so I figured ‘why not end it off with some lists?’

COOL FEATURES I HAVE SO FAR (YAY :] )

  • Procedurally animated soft body pigeon!
  • A* Pathfinding cars
  • Mouse based camera and cursor

I REALLY NEED HELP WITH:

  • Making the cars not want to drive through each other
  • Make the pigeon react to getting hit by the cars…
  • (By the way, the two list points above, are a little more complex to solve than meets the eye. You’d have to look at the code to see what I mean… ;-; )
  • Using @BLADEr’s image mapping extension to make swaying tree images (I hope that’s how I can use the extension.)

Oooh, I can have polls too!

Do you think this is okay?
  • Yay
  • Nay
0 voters

And…

Should the cars drive on the right or left side of the road?
  • Right
  • Left
  • CENTER >:D
0 voters

So uh, this is the end of my post!
If you have any suggestions or help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Have a splendid day!

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You could probably use my continuous rotation extension for the swaying trees! I created palm (but not swaying) trees in a game recently…

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That was for the Sports Jam. I’m sure you could do some fancy thing with sin wave families to make little trees look like they’re swaying! or just use a thick parabola maybe?

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To use the image mapping extension I would suggest having an array of X and Y postions of the images, then having some sort of sin thing on loop to change the x (my favorite formula is sin(frequency * increasingVariable) * distance it travels) and use a for loop to create an image with the x and y positions from the array to draw the image

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It’s not overtaking the forums, it’s just that basically everyone is participating in it, which is normal for an official game jam.

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I see you have my recording extension downloaded…

Can’t wait to see what you do with it!

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true… it’s really just for dramatic effect, y’know?

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ooh that’s a better idea. I never thought of that.
It’s probably easier and looks better.

If I knew how to make thick parabola though :(
I haven’t the foggiest idea as to how to go about doing that.

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i realllyyy like that extension.
I plan on making some kinda security camera, or replay mechanic with it :slight_smile:

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Also if you want to know how he does it he clones the screen and then save it to an array and you access it from the array

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I’m working on an update right now. I want to make it so you can pause and resum videos

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UPDATE 0.5

Yippee another update!

So today I took @BLADEr’s (thanks btw) advice and made swaying trees with their brilliant image rotation extension.

Microsoft MakeCode Arcade and 22 more pages - Personal - Microsoft_ Edge 2026-10-24 18-42-23

How i did it (nerd explanation >:<teehee>D)

Two words.

SINE WAVE

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A sine wave is a smooth oscillation, going above and below a central value.
I’m no expert on this subject, i’m just playing with blocks, but…

I have a constantly increasing variable ‘tick’, and rotate an image by using:

sin((tick * frequency/0.1) + treeX) * amplitude/7

But thats too predictable.
We need randomness.
We need.. a second sine wave.

We can do

sin((tick * frequency/0.1) + treeX) * amplitude/7 + sin((tick * frequency/0.3) + treeX) * amplitude/4

And get something that looks like this.

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And the shadows are just Richard’s shade extension, rendering the tree as a shadow, but with a 220 degree offset.

Try it out here! :)

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OH MY GOSHNESS!!! THESE LOOK SO GOOD! :open_mouth:

I cannot describe how happy I am that you came up with those gorgeous trees.
And their shadows add such a clean feel to your game!
I would love it if you could describe more in detail how you created the trees and create a reply in my Procedural Animation dev page!

Very Nice Job! :clap:

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Man this is gorgeous, I can’t wait to see the final result!

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Wait, you HAVE A RECORDING EXTENSION???

PLEASE SEND ME THE LINK!!!

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I don’t even know what to say!

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It might take up a lot of space so I’m gonna work on it later

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WOW TYSM!!!

I’m genuinely really flattered getting a compliment from the creator of all the procedural animation extensions.

I really need to stress that the trees wouldn’t be possible without your image rotation extension.

Needless to say, I will gladly take you up on the offer to post about the trees on the procedural animation dev page.

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thank you so much!!

reading all these comments really make my day!
so thank you, everyone who commented on this devlog.

y’all are awesome! :smiley:

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my take on this

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Sir I don’t think the shadow should overlay the tree

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