Birdwatching

Super sweet game! Really honed my typing skills. Though the web version crashes when I try to play :(.
Downloaded version works perfectly!

bird

Nice birds! Didn't quite know what I have to do at first but figured it out eventually :D

This is a cool game, the various interesting facts about the birds are a nice touch. However I do feel like some random unexpected events could be cool.

Cool typing game. However, how to play section would be nice. It took me a while to figure out how to play.

Took me a while to understand the mechanic too x)
Birds are cute, but I just have no time to WATCH properly!
Well done!

The web version crashed when I failed to type the bird's name

I love birds also, seem to be a really great game to learn names.
I see that other comments don't understood what to do at first, that wasn't the case for me, seem clear
I'm glad that it work with AZERTY keyboard also

Hahaha I love the bird facts and the learning through intense repetition when you mess up have have less time!

This game is for the birds! Took me a while to figure out it was a typing game honestly, but after that it was pretty nice!

Never knew bird-watching could be some much fun

Cool bird facts! It would be nice if there were a bird-watching guide so you can check how many birds you have left and take the time to properly admire the bird art instead of trying to type their latin name asap!

A simple game, but it has nice birds, neat little facts, and reveals how bad I really am at typing.

Always love an ol' typing game ! And if I can learn about birds at the same time !!

Ok I'm really bad at typing XD I thought it was going to be relaxing but it's pretty challenging for me :p

The game crashed on the third retry. Nice chiptune, but too repetitive. Facts are amazing! Birds are gorgeous!

I like all the random bird facts Lol. The game is pretty cool, but it can be super frustrating to have a whole word deleted because of one typo. I would suggest just removing the last typed letter instead as a less extreme penalty (you could also freeze the player for or something like that instead). But overall, still a cool game with some really nice bird art!

Can't say I was expecting to learn so many bird facts this LD, but I appreciate it a lot. I would encourage you to consider a smaller penalty over deleting the whole word if you make a mistake and maybe giving the music a little more body on the low end. Other than that, the game is responsive and has this really tight, consistent aesthetic. Great stuff!

Good clean bird fun! The game over text is cute too. Learnt a whole lot, birds are actually very cool!

This is a neat take on the theme. It is also a great way to show just how poor I am at typing. Yet I perservered. I feel like I learned quite a lot about birds and myself. It kinda put me in a zen state for a few minutes, either that or I am still recovering from the lack of sleep. Great Entry!

Someone took "The Bird is the word" very seriously. Haha very unique take on the jam! wish you layered the bird drawings so the wings would flap too. Could see this as a serious typing trainer.

Those are some interesting bird names that I didnt know existed!
Cool word game and is nicely implemented.
Who knew I would be learning about birds in a game jam!

Fun and informational :smile: Wish you could backspace when making an error, but that's okay. Good on testing unusual words and letter combinations I don't usually type!

Love birds. Love typing. Had a great time.

I did end up taking my headphones off because the music got really drony after a few loops and there was no mute button in game.

The birds look amazing! What software did you use to make them? The game and music are both a bit repetitive though. I wish the gameplay had a bit more complexity to it. Regardless, the bird facts at the bottom are quite cool.

Would be nice if there was some sort of indication of how long your streak of named birds was but otherwise it was a great game, looked nice and felt pretty complete for what it was and I'm fairly sure I learned something, it's a shame LD doesn't have an "educational" rating value (I decided Mood is probably the best substitute).

Some indication that you had typed the space between the names (maybe an underscore that only appears after you'd done it?) would be good too as that's the main thing that tripped me up.

This is great! ^^ Try being dyslectic for impossible mode haha, just reading the factoids as fast as possible is hard enough :')

That’s an intense bird watching! I am a big fan of typing games, so, well done! Pretty unforgiving tho - would be nice to have "easier" mode where if you don’t hit the proper key, the typing progress stays. Undoing the whole progress is pretty unforgiving, but perhaps that’s part of the fun!
Too bad that there is not some game over window that would show us how many birds have we watched or how many seconds did we last, so we can compare!

Interesting concept, and a nice take on the "every 10 seconds something interesting happens" interpretation of the theme. The typing game genre was a good fit!

Considering the length of the words compared to the "typing window", having to restart from the beginning after an error, means that it is often not possible to recover from a mistake. Resetting the progress of the word instead of the entire name (or keeping the progress, but ignoring the keypresses) might make the game easier for people who cannot type as fast (perhaps as an easy mode).

Some kind of stat-tracking could have been fun as well, or even just a final end-screen showing all the birds and descriptions that were discovered during the game (to be able to read the descriptions at your own pace).

I liked the graphics of the birds as well as the educational aspects. Especially as those text-bubbles would also show the "easier" every-day name of the birds.

Interesting game!

A neat take on the theme! (Though it revealed how bad I am at typing...)

These names are really hard for fast typing.
By the way, my game is also about bird... :)

Birb.

Most likely already mentioned, but it is a shame that you need to restart after every fail. :(

It would be also cool to add more game mechanics to it, some reactions of the narrator when you fail, stuff like that. But I know it is a compo game, so it is easier to say than to do within those 48h. :sweat_smile:

Simple, little game, and the birbs. I have parrot Pionus Menstruus myself. :bird:

It's been a while since I played a typing game, this was fun and educational! ^^

This is so fun! Birbs! Biiiiiiiiiirbs

Also that fact about sparrows. Wow, I never knew that! Cigarette butts! Who would have thought!

The typing speed is fine for me, but I suppose I also do type relatively fast. I agree that the resets are annoying though, it would be better to just accept wrong keypresses and allow the user to correct with backspace, or something of the sort - more similar to how real typing works.

Simple but efficient game, it is just very unforgiving to do a single mistake.

Cute ! The fun thing is I also did a typing game :)

I love the fun facts when I succeed typing a name, and the graphics are cute. I find the music a little boring though, not enough variation imo.

I am in love with this game, love the concept! It's a nice twist on a typing game, and I like how you integrated the 10 second theme without visible countdowns or similar things, but "organically" inside the game. Love the art and the naturalistic touch. Not a great fan of the music if I have to be honest, but I completely understand it in this context. Would love to see it as a complete game with an extensive roster of naturalistic curiosities :D could work really well with bugs too

Really nice graphics with a lot of bird knowledge! Great entry:)

Very cute, great little game. Very well done
I like birds!

Such a cute game!! I really loved the tidbits of information about the birds. It also really highlighted how inaccurate my typing is haha xD Overall I had fun!! Great submission!!

Interesting theme about scientific names... Might be able to be used in education? :D
BTW it is really hard for me....

cute funny typeing game,I like this one, but some bird animations will helps a lot

Nice and simple game! I just kept looking at the dialogue text to type in the bird names, which then changes immediately after finishing so I was unable to read half of it lol

This is wonderful. I think I would remove the requirement to type a space between the words or find a way to visually represent it, like you did with the letters.

Fun twist on the typing game concept! Easy to pick up and play and I can see how this could easily grow into the next big typing practice website. You could have a whole encyclopaedia of animals/birds/plants/etc and the world would be filled with both more knowledgeable people and faster typists!

It is simple but it is a solid game! I like how I can actually learn something by playing the game. The theme and beatiful art definitely add to otherwise quite used mechanic - making it even a bit unique!

I can always appreciate when someone takes the time to create their own music for a jam game. I would have personally picked something more suddle and relaxing but as I said it is always an achievement when you create music for your games on top of everything else!

Great work!

Great fit for the theme. Thanks for the knowledge! :)

Good fitting theme for the game, I really like the graphics and love the bird facts!
I wish there was a bit of a clearer visual to you typing, it was difficult to understand where I was in the word, especially when I needed to do a space or had just finished a word. Making that a bit clearer is the only improvement I can think of. Good Job!

Ha ha took me a lot of 10 seconds to understand that I have to type those incredibly difficult names. And I didn't look at the graphics from that point ... ha ha ...
Very clever idea, but if you put the name only on the bird than at least I know how it looks. Now I known how to type Cortunix cortunix but I don't know how it looks .. ha ha ha .

Good game.

This is great! So chill and I love the bird facts. My favorite little UI thing is that the Latin bird names in the description text at the bottom light up green at the same time as the names directly above the bird. If you keep working on this project in the future, I think animating the birds a bit would have a really great impact (although I totally understand why it was out of scope for a weekend jam). I feel like the birdwatcher community would be really into this. :D Nice job!

This is a really well made game! The art is lovely. The concept is very simple yet engaging. Typing is always fun, and we got to look at beautiful birds as well! Music got a bit repetitive after a while. My only complaint really is that I ended up looking more at the text boxes than at the birds :( I realized at some point that the name could be read by watching the bird as well, but because they come in after the text, looking at the text was more efficient. Maybe there are ways to make it more into actual bird watching rather than textbox watching? Anyway, excellent game!

Love the art and the fun facts that you provide! Would be nice to have an appendix of all the birds and their common names at the end the each level.

Not a big fan of typing games in gamejam personally, but the bird facts and drawings were cool indeed. Sadly it did get boring quite fast.

Color scheme and art was great. I'm annoyingly addicted to typing games so this fed my addiction to well lol

More bird facts for the god of bird facts

Woah that is hard, I think there is a bit of a wpm cap on the game if I typed too fast it didn't register my inputs unfortunately. But I thought it was super cute! I loved all the birds I got to see, nice job!

I really love the art!

A cute little typing game i could use to get my skills up

I was fearing I had to know the bird names from the description, hopefully they are given during the game x) The art is very nice, I may I runned out of birds at some point I was only getting already seen birds. Great job ^^

A cool concept, but little simple and fast for my liking.

Fun little game, had some challenge too. Not sure I've seen anything like this for a Jam before!

I liked the birds and the bird facts :) Very nice job, I think I saw all 24! :0 I found it difficult to both look at the art of the bird flying by and type because I would type based on the text box rather than the text over the board, and I wish it were easier for me to appreciate the art during the game. The music also got repetitive after a while.

Genius idea, love the execution!

Oh my gosh why are bird names so hard to type lol. I liked the random facts between birds, very charming educational game.

Little, but very hard game. Nice work!

Seems like it's just a basic typing game unless I'm missing something. Would have liked to see more innovation in mechanics or other ideas. Art is nice, music is repetitive and short.

A big issue is that the game doesn't get more difficult over time, so you can end up just typing nonstop until you decide to give up on your own.

Thanks everyone for all the feedback! I really appreciate everyone taking the time to play and post!

I really enjoy the learning process and never felt that my typing was tjhat much bad

Who knew bird names were so hard to type lmao! The little facts about the bird were super nice, but at a certain point I couldnt read them as I was madly trying to keep up! Good game.

As others have clearly stated......

Bird.

:bird:

Hey I liked this! I'm no ornithologist but bird facts are poggers. I wish I had the ability to hit backspace rather than having to retype the entire word, but I might just be coping with the fact that I am terrible at typing.

This game is really fun and educational.
I could type 100 wpm in vietnamese and 70 wpm in english.
And now i can type 1 bird per 10 seconds.

Wow, there's no way I'll be able to type all the names and read all the facts, but this game is awesome and the style is so cool. Can you publish a post-compo bird catalog so we can enjoy? Very creative

I like being rewarded by the fact about each bird. Solid gameplay that fits the theme well.

I'me realy bad at theme but I love typing games, and that's a cool iteration of it + i love myself a good bird fact

Cool game good job doing it in 48 hours

Looks like a nice idea, unfortunately I don't seem to be able to play. When I type nothing happens and pressing space scrolls to the bottom of the page..

A simple typing game. With nice graphics and facts!)

Hah I suck at typing - nice birds :D Fun idea, how did you choose which birds?

I LOVE BIRDS!!! I LOVE THEM, however i suck at typing lol, overall this is a nice little game :)

Typing in jam and typing after jam feels different. Nice birds and game.

> birb

Would be nice to have some animations and maybe a better difficulty curve?

Let me remember the old time playing typing game haha

@danvil I think maybe you were clicked out of the WebGL box, so your input was on the page instead of in the game. You should just need to click in the box to play!

Thats really cute - to bad i cant type and read the infotext at the same time. Now that i think about it for a programmer i really suck at typing...

Wow looks awesome!
It is really cool that you make a game about birds and facts about it.
But I have a few remarks that impact to my gameplay experience((
1. I havent't enough time to read the facts((
2. Typing is really hard specially for people who don't have blind typing skill.

But still cool, I really love it)

Cool idea nice implementation. Well done

The cutest entry I came across yet! The birds are really beautifully drawn, I just wish I had more time to look at them :). Solid entry!

I love the graphics, but I found that I had to focus on the words to type them fast enough, and it wasn't clear to me that I needed to add a space

Really chill informative game, shamefully took me a few tries to understand that i was supposed to type the birds name lol

Cool and addictive. It would be nice to have some score.

I found it rather difficult to type with the text moving right to left across the screen because it's natural to read left to right. I normally type at 140 wpm without errors but couldn't get through a single bird. I was disappointed because the concept is great and I wished I could see more bird facts.

@sean-esopenko thanks for giving it a shot! If it helps, I also have the name in the text box at the bottom that also highlights your progress, so you have an option not to look at the text above the bird. :)

Interesting bird watching game

A very cool idea. The main mechanics are addictive and entertaining. Very cool!

This is a fantastic idea! I love typing games, too. So this is perfect.

The addition of having bird facts between levels is great. Although I wish one had to type those, too.

I wish that it didn't force you to start over on typos. None of the other typing games I know work in this way.

Birds that come from the left are so much harder than from the right, since you have to wait for them to enter the frame completely to see the first letter.

Animating the bird wings would make this game feel amazing, I think. But that's obviously out of scope for LD.

Great idea. Thanks for making it!

Very cute game! I love the idea to fill in the empty time between birds with bird facts! Really great idea, and the artwork is really good too! Amazing work!

I hate my fingers, this really made me realize how bad i am at typing. But its a really fun idea.

Ha-ha. Great one. I like sounds, and the idea in general. Good job!

Ooh well I definitely learned a lot about birds! Who knew there was a bird who's wings excreted wax? :eyes: Great art, solid mechanic (I love typing games) and well put together and polished! Great job

Great game to practice typing and learning about birds! :D Had my problems typing those long names within 10 seconds, not gonna lie. The music could change up a bit from time to time, it was a bit repetitive.

I can no type fast ): fun game though!

Polished game, great entry! Feels a bit punishing to have to restart the typing on any mistake, especially with the time constraint, but it probably is more due to my typing skills needing some work!

Great to learn some interesting facts at the same time!

pls make the typing words ez thnx too hard, but was fun :)

Really cute and polished game, great job! Loved all the bird facts.

I was competing with a friend and he complained that I kept getting the "pica pica" :laughing:

...Turdus merula? Nice work, although your keyboard detection is clearly flawed because it says I didn't type it right when trust me I really did I swear.

Happy to see an educational game as an entry. Nice arts. I liked the typing challenge. I would have loved some animation on the birds (at least one more image). I felt it a bit difficult (even almost impossible) to both read the whole text and concentrate to type the complicated latin names of the birds at the same time. Nice attempt though.

A cute game. I definitely learned a lot. I would have liked it if it was linear instead of random with the bird appearances though as I got a lot of repeats, so I was never sure if I saw all the birds or not. Loved the look of the birds though.

Funny game , would be nice to have some animation in the birds. Game idea super clean.

Didn't read the description at first, so I just stared at screen for couple of runs... Dummy... Anyway, nice take, at first I didn't quite understand why you have selected birds specifically, until I've started typing their names myself :laughing: That was quite hard.

Great game!!! Very cute!!! Bird.

Love the concept but it's hard you have to type really fast :laughing:

Cool, but punishing! Would love a "casual mode" where I could delete. It was a shame that I didn't get to absorb all the bird facts. Still, very cool idea, GREAT use of the theme.

You really love birds that's obvious. I'm good at typing, but not typing and reading. So even though I could manage to write down many names, I had zero time to read their interesting infos. Once I tried, game over :/

My takeaways:
- Scientific bird names are long
- Your bird facts are great.

Nice game, I'm not too good at typing so it was a bit of a challenge but quite fun! I loved how you included bird facts in there as well! great stuff.

This was the wholesome game I needed! Great work on building this by yourself!

Really neat idea and nice drawings! I'd suggest not showing the bird's names at the bottom, since then the player can (and should) then just not look at the bird. As a typing tutor this could be quite nice, increasing the length of the bird name as the player progresses. And you could also add a memory (actually learning the bird name) component by not showing the name at all after a few times.

This was a nice little game and really shows up my terrible typing! The drawings were really nice, but I did find that I was just looking at the bottom of the screen and not at them which is a shame. Great to see a birdwatching-themed game though, there should be more of these things!

Really fun but my typing let me down also I kept missing the space.

Simple and entertaining way to learn about types of birds and lets also forces you to be better at typing. Well done!

Birbs! I enjoy your take - as well as typing, and latin.

The brevity of this game is a treat. Nice work! :)

Typed hard, failed. Got bird facts anyway. Nice.

I definitely would've liked some more feedback on if my keystrokes were correct or incorrect, and perhaps a better algorithm for selecting the next bird. I got a lot of repeats. But great entry, very informative and cute! :tada:

🐦

feeling like a pyrrhula pyrrhula right now

Feels like a serious game. But the timing is a bit too fast to understand.

this was great!! Really liked how it rewarded you with bird facts when you typed successfully! Nice art too! Really enjoyed this one ^_^

That was so interesting ^^ It's really rare to learn something with Game Jam titles ^^

Nice concept!

For me the bad points are: at first it was not clear to me you had to type the space and the music loop is a bit short and gets annoying at some point. Also, a score would have been nice, even with no score board to make the player wants to play more and know if they did better than the previous time.

Overall nice to play, I got hooked ;)

It seems like everything has been said already in the comments so just now that I quite enjoyed the game (as someone who takes latin as a language, I appreciate seeing latin used someone other than a tombstone)

Great work! Love the idea! So creative! Art is comfy and love the detail :) I sure did learn quite a bit! Thank you for making this!

wholesome as hell

TIL

Nice robot game!

Cute, I learned some bird stuff. I admit to not being a big fan of the music, it was fairly repetitive, and I would've loved something more zen. Maybe hearing the bird calls when you get an answer right would be cool too. Nice job.

I enjoyed this! Very zen, learn some bird facts, fits the theme. The music really grew on me too! I got the same bird a few times in a row, though, maybe something to prevent that from happening would be nice, like a list of recently seen birds so you know what not to repeat. Good job!

Interesting idea, but names are so hard, my best was 3 birds

Really interesting and educational game :D Would be great so have some sort of score in the end, how many birds you typed correctly. Great job!

I learned something! Except my broken A key failed me one too many times but that's on me, the game idea was so very cute.

lots of biiiiiiiiirds cannot get the latin out of my head now i was educated indeed!
i did enjoy the birdwatching
i would love to have a counter how many did i get right before failing!

I'll be honest I didn't enjoy it. I felt the gameplay and the theme just didn't fit with each other. The typing is quite punishing since it deletes all your characters for a single wrong one and you lose immediately for one missed bird. That is fine, but it makes me hyperfocus on the bird's name instead of the facts that were around it. Also the name is shown twice, one above the bird and one at the bottom, but the one above the bird is moving and harder to read, so I mostly focused on the bottom one. I only had the time to glance at the bird for a little bit and read the facts if I managed to type out the text fast enough without mistakes, else I'd be scrambling to type things out instead.

It's kind of a shame since the bird drawings are great and the facts about the birds were really interesting, but the gameplay discouraged me from appreciating them.

Cool bird facts, but the "instant death" and slightly annoying music kind of ruined it for me. Would have loved to see some sort of difficulty increase over time, as it is now I did not feel it if it was there. The birds looked great though!

Someone call Mavis Beacon, there's a bunch of birds in her house! In all seriousness though, very interesting concept. As a certified Not-Great-Typist:tm:, I feel like there should have been some more forgiveness rather than if you miss one letter you basically have no chance of coming back especially when the words aren't commonly known words. Other than that, good game!

Wow great piece of type teaching software, going to show my kid. So fun, though I clearly need to type faster faster.

Cute game

Birb game best game! Great entry! One thing I'd suggest and maybe someone else already has, is that if spaces are also checked then it there should also be feedback for the spaces, like a green underline or a green rectangle filling the space

Really unique idea! Now I know so much more about birds that I'd ever imagined :laughing:

Probably learned more about birds here than I have in real life! Really fun, I liked it! :thumbsup:

I feel like a bird expert now!

Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiird

Such a fun game! And I somehow managed to always type the last character wrong..

Everybody knows that bird is the word.

Great idea and execution overall!

Well now that's a game where you learn many things! So interesting, could be sold with Wingspan boardgame, would make a great bundle!
Awesome art, nice music, a bit repetitive, but it's a really cool idea, thanks!

Mavis Beacon teaches birdwatching.

Good to know all those birds!~

Nice little game:)
That birds are awesome, great work!

I know more birds than ever now.... this was really funny thank you!

=_= space key ;;

Really relaxing vibe, nice to feel like I know a little more about birds now. Nice work!

Really great job and very unique! It was for sure relaxing like many others mentioned (except for constantly forgetting to press space haha) Definitely fun to learn a bunch of facts about birds. Nice job!

Great job! I liked your concept very much. Like another commenter said, it would be very nice paired with Wingspan, to add an extra challenge lol. Well done!

I had fun thanks for the play through! hope you had a good Jam!

This game was intriguing, and the random facts about each bird made it more intuitive, overall, decent game.

Very fun concept, equally infuriating words. Could have become a little monotonous if I had ever gotten more than a few birds each time :)

I found some comedy from the disconnect between peacefully watching birds and furiously trying to type out their names, which seemed like they were made up to purposefully be the bane of my slow fingers.

The art was really great, and it's clear you played into your strengths with that. While I was going to pick on the music, I then saw you describe it as "A sweet birding bop!", and now I must agree.

This was a neat concept, it seems like this could be turned into a cool tool for learning to identify birds if the typing was replaced with some kind of multiple choice. I really liked the bird artwork, but I think typos were punished kind of harshly, and the lack of a sound effect made it easy to not realize you had messed up until it was too late. Great work!

Love the vibes of this entry, so calm and sweet.

Welp, i'm definitely not the quickest burbwatcher, haha

I am a sucker for typing games, and I think this one is a great concept as well. Expressing birdwatching through a typing game just makes sense, at least to me, and while playing it I definitely feel like somebody struggling to spit out Latin names for birds so that I can start nerding out about cool bird facts.

However, during the gameplay it really seemed like my inputted letters were being dropped, like, way more often than I would expect, given that my keyboard tends to work generally pretty well normally (for example, I typed almost all of this sentence very quickly and without typos).

So, I suspected that perhaps the game was only allowing me to enter a single letter per frame, and from a cursory inspection of the source code it seems like this is true. Now, I'm not entirely sure if I personally can actually type more than 1 letters per frame, so maybe this is all a red herring... but I do think it would be worth changing it. If a player can type two letters in one frame, then the game should definitely let them. (From what I can tell, this is what Unity's Input.inputString is for. But, I don't know for sure as I'm not a Unity user :sweat_smile: )

I do think that rejecting the whole string when the user messes up is actually kind of fun. It is really hard, but I think if the input system was patched as I described, it would be less annoying. One other tweak that would improve it: tell the user which character was wrong when they mess up. If that was added, I think I would actually really enjoy a typing game where I had to be perfect for the whole string.

Overall, I really do love the concept and I had a good time trying to maximize my bird facts, even if I had to try to type very carefully to have the best hope of winning.

my demise

Overall a pretty nice game. Artwork and colors makes me feel good ;)

You got my 5 ⭐️

Enjoyed your game! Very attractive and educational. It can be used for kids (and not only) as a typing exerciser

Nice relaxing game with good visuals.

GG WP! innovative and fun

Delightful, simple little game. As a biologist, I approve