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(Windows only)

Controls

Left/Right - Fly or hop left/right
Up - Fly (press repeatedly)
Down - Land quickly
Space - Status
B - Start building (when able)
Escape - Difficulty/Quit menu
Enter - Select menu items

Instructions

It's mating season!

Your job, as a male bowerbird, is to build a bower.

A bower is not a nest, but an impressive structure made from sticks, leaves, flowers, and various other items found in the forest. When females look for a mate, their choice is based primarily on who has created the best one.

You'll have 15 minutes to make the biggest, most lavishly-decorated bower you can manage in that amount of time.

The difficulty level you choose at the start corresponds to bower size. The more elaborate and harder-to-build it is, the greater the likelihood it'll attract females.

The worst thing you can do is not finish, so if you find you've chosen too hard a task, you may change to an easier difficulty at any time. Likewise, if you find yourself catching on very quickly, you may want to consider switching to a harder difficulty.

If you change the difficulty, however, time keeps ticking and you will lose all items collected to that point. You will only keep the skills/power-ups you've acquired, if any.

Once you leave the game or time expires, mating season is over. You will not be able to play again until next year. (Really.)

The successful bowerbird knows his abilities, and knows how to adapt his workload to the amount of time available in order to at least finish.

Ornithology

Male bowerbirds spend their lives learning how to create elaborate structures called bowers. Females choose mates based on the quality of those bowers and their presentation. Often, the owner of the best bower will mate many times while the less impressive builders must wait to try again next year.

Not only are bowers remarkable for their construction, but also for their decor. Males are very particular about the way their bower looks, and take great pains to organize it. In between two tall arrangements of sticks you may find a little pile of blue petals, a stack of white quartz pebbles next to it, and several 2-liter soda bottle caps nearby, all surrounded by a circle of stacked leaves. Some birds will crush certain types of vegetation and combine it with spit to "paint" some area. Others might take great pains to collect a huge number of some attractive berry.

Bowers vary greatly in size, construction, contents, and complexity, as determined by species, environment, and individual taste (pictures: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14).

I'm a fan of the bowerbird, but don't let all this fool you: the game makes no attempt to be scientifically accurate.

Background (spoilers!)

I have a bad habit of taking on projects that are too big for the amount of time there is to complete it - this is especially true for creative assignments. Sometimes I finish and sometimes I can scale back, but there have been many times that, after putting a great deal of effort into something, I realize I must decide whether to give up and start over with something more manageable, or keep going and risk not finishing or producing something I'm not happy with.

Bowerbird was conceptualized while working on another game. When I realized my rudimentary drawing skills were such that it would take me much, much too long to create 16-bit graphics for an expansive, pretty game set in a park, I was faced with that unfortunate crossroad. I decided, after much anguish, to start anew.

This game attempts to put the player in such a position.

It attempts to establish the urgency of a project with a deadline (a school assignment, for example) in that you’re timed and do not get a second chance. You’re effectively graded at the end and the game becomes unplayable for a year. The latter is, as far as I know, a unique game mechanic that will surely annoy many people but is necessary to force the player to take his or her bower seriously (assuming a willing participant).

In most games you can experiment with different difficulties freely, knowing that you can always just reset the game and start over. Resetting Bowerbird is equivalent to quitting, which also renders it unplayable until next season. The difficulty level can be switched at any point, but doing so doesn't grant any additional time and will cost you all the items picked up so far. You retain only "skills" (power-ups), similar to the way I lost everything but my game design experience when I scrapped my other game.

One must thus be able to assess the difficulty of the task as it relates to the time left. You are responsible for managing your time. There are no warning buzzers and you must press the space bar to see how much time you have left.

There is also a creative element: you must decide how you want your bower to look. Trying your best to create something beautiful will be rewarded, though that isn’t explicitly stated (and so must come from ambition).

There are other symbolic bits that attempt to effectively put the player in that particular position of crisis that I'm so familiar with. Some of these are obvious while ohers are probably only meaningful to me.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about this final product. On the one hand, it's not especially fun or dynamic. On the other, it only ever aimed to be fun enough to keep someone's attention while carrying out the real goal: to use the unlikely medium of video game to mimic a personal mental conflict (and nothing much else).

There are a number of things I'd still like to work on: graphics (backgrounds and textures in particular), better endings, more movement on some of the screens, etc. Hopefully I have time in the near future.

If you really want to, you can download a replayable version of the game here.

Last updated: 2010-08-17