Project Jackdaw Devlog 1

If you’ve been following our BlueSky account, you’ll know that Project Jackdaw is a new indie game we’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. It’s a top-down, zelda-like adventure game where you play as a jackdaw who saves his beautiful island and the creatures on it from the ravages of automated capitalism.

Setting

Project Jackdaw is set on an island with beautiful natural scenery and lots of friendly animals with colourful personalities! The first area is called Bramblewood, a small town in the middle of an autumnal forest.

Here in the opening scene of the game, the town will be attacked by robotic lumberjacks seeking to pillage the forest for building materials. Jackdaw will spring into action to rescue his town, before setting off an a larger adventure to protect the whole island.

We already have the whole world map and a vague outline of the story and the environments planned. The whole game will take place in one room within GameMaker, with the overworld planned to be 12 screens by 12 screens wide.

As you can see we’re in the very early stages of development but we hope to craft a beautiful world everyone will fall in love with!

Mechanics

If you’re familiar with games like The Legend of Zelda, Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Ittle Dew and other top-down adventure games, you’ll already have a pretty good idea of what we’re aiming for!

Take control of Jackdaw, run around exploring every nook and cranny of his precious island, all while bashing the bad guys with your sword and other special items you pick up along the way.

We’ll unveil new items, puzzles and challenges as we add them to the game and share them here in our series of devlogs with you!

We hope to release a small demo of the first area of the game this autumn so you can get to grips with the game while we work on the full version.

To keep up to date with the latest Project Jackdaw news, be sure to follow Daniel (me) on Bluesky and the Chequered Ink account too.

All the best,

Daniel