Interview with the Team Behind Pigeon: A Love Story

It’s that time of year again! The Six One Indie Showcase is in full swing and that means loads of amazing indies being shown off and, of course, we’ve got more developer interviews for you. We sent some questions over to the team behind the meditative game about a pigeon find their true love, Pigeon: A Love Story, and they were kind enough to send over some answers.

A huge thank you to Alex and John for being a part of our September showcase and for allowing us to show off Pigeon: A Love Story.

• Can you tell me a little bit about the team behind Pigeon: A Love Story?

  (Alex, founder of Wristwork Studio): My name is Alex, and I run the Wristwork game studio. My background is formally in art & design, but I have been coding for the best part of a decade now. I figured relatively recently that games could be a good place to combine these interests.

  (John a.k.a Madwreck, electronic music producer and composer): I’m John, aka Madwreck. I’m an electronic music producer and composer based in North Carolina. I started working with Wristwork in the early stages of FACEMINER. It went swimmingly, and now we’re working on a really cool game about pigeons!

• How did the idea for the game come about? Were there any notable sources of inspiration?

  (Alex, founder of Wristwork Studio): The game was originally devised in 2021, while stuck indoors; very much a lockdown project. The main inspiration for the game is Desert Bus, the somewhat infamous minigame that was to be part of the cancelled Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors game compilation. In that, you play as a bus driver travelling from Tucson to Las Vegas in real-time; it takes about 8 hours of driving through a barren, featureless desert landscape to complete. I enjoy the way that adding realism to the “wrong” places creates a game where the act of sitting down and playing it becomes a sort of absurdist durational performance in itself (and you can indeed find some of these on Youtube). Pigeon: A Love Story is a little less uncompromising in some ways, but is ultimately a homage to that idea, as well as an excuse to explore the fun technical exercise of using real world city tiles in a game.

• It looks like there was an early build in 2021 for the game. How has this newest version changed from the original iteration?

  (Alex, founder of Wristwork Studio): Scaled up in all of the ways that are befitting for a mobile to desktop game transition! More cities, better graphics, and a multiplayer mode. The biggest technical change is that the original relied on an external service to download the map tiles in realtime, which made development simpler, but unfortunately the service I was using was shut down not too long after I released the game, which is why it’s essentially wiped from the internet. Four years later, free and open maps are now in a place where I can create the game with no external dependencies and complete the original vision.

• Pigeon: A Love Story features full-scale maps of London, New York, and Tokyo to name a few. How were those cities chosen?

  (Alex, founder of Wristwork Studio): So far, I've been choosing cities that tick a few boxes: large enough to take a while to explore, varied enough so that each map is distinct, and dense enough IRL to support thriving pigeon populations. The current lineup might shift quite a bit before release; ultimately, I'd love for the players to have some sort of say as to which cities get included, and ideally release tooling so people can add their own custom maps to the game, too.

• How is it developing a meditative soundtrack for a game about love?

  (John a.k.a Madwreck, electronic music producer and composer): I think we’ve nailed down the sound we’re looking for. I’ve been doing a lot of research and looking for inspiration. I seem to be finding it from Joe Hisaishi, the Final Fantasy X soundtrack, and some classic ambient electronic albums (Brian Eno, Vangelis, and others). We want to make sure it has a liminal, atmospheric essence that complements the gameplay and the love theme. But much like a night at the Roxbury, one must be so inclined to ask: what is love?

• What does “indie” mean to you?

  (Alex, founder of Wristwork Studio): The luxury of being small enough to take the kind of risks (ie make weird games) that larger studios cannot.

  (John a.k.a Madwreck, electronic music producer and composer): Indie = passion. At the core of any prominent indie game is a person that truly loves what they do, often being completely consumed by their own creation. And if they make it out of the mouth of madness, a beautiful game is born.

Pigeon: A Love Story does not yet have a release date but you can wishlist the game on Steam now.