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Amidst the joyous chaos of Bad Magpie’s first trailer, there is a striking undertone of melancholy. The game warden – a wounded corvid who causes chaos wherever he goes – shouts in disgust as a group of his own kind pass overhead, with a noticeable difference in their formations.
Milktooth game designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this image in her head for years. While lying in the grass one afternoon during the closing of 2020, he looked up and saw a V-shaped shape in the sky, incomplete. “It still stuck with me,” he said. “I wrote about it online and someone told me about the ‘missing men’ group, which is an airplane salute to a fallen pilot.”
Previously, Fernandez and colleagues George Batchelor and Catherine Unger in State of Play Sports (South of the Circle) were struggling with their own game ideas. Unger – whose iconic artwork can be seen in SFB’s The Mermaid Mask – pitched the idea to the team. “It was a fairy tale about a duck who falls in love with a star and goes on a quest to bring back a gift,” says Batchelor. “This was 2019, and because the duck was white…”
The meaning is clear. Any game that has a bird of prey will always be compared to it The Nameless Goose Gamebut then the apparent similarity to the Bafta winner House inspired the team to consider a different approach. The star and the search for the center remained, but as time went on it became clear that the magpie was a better fit for a story about a man looking for shiny things as a distraction from his abandoned problems. They probably had to change it, Fernandez says, but it felt like the right choice: “You know, ‘One sad, one happy…’ – that sounds like a song about people who depend on each other.”
The game, in turn, is designed to be something inclusive – which can be read as a meta-commentary on how games distract us from many existential concerns. Not just for fun, either. “One thing that George and I talk about quite a bit is that making games is the best way to avoid it, because there’s so much work you can do for yourself,” Fernandez says, adding that his anxiety about death “is the quietest it’s ever been” as development continues.
All of this can lead to games where you set garden plots on fire, set off fireworks through car windows and drive a digital recorder with a horn in your mouth, sounding very scary. However there is a confusion about the test, which Batchelor says was inspired by Zelda: Breath of the Wild. “It means we get amazing results,” he says. “And some surprisingly unhelpful results,” said Fernandez.
This has led to a series of interesting accidents, as the studio builds a sandbox that feels like it’s reacting to the players’ actions, aided by Eli Rainsberry’s deft audio design that gives each element its own sonic palette. “We’re experimenting all the time, so we see what (the actors) want to do and try to mimic that — or make jokes that resonate with them,” Batchelor says. For all that has been increasing, there has been a little less: the desire to “minimize” the game, as Fernandez says, led to the removal of the model village, the House came first.
He didn’t have to worry. The Bad Magpie is a bird of its own – mainly because of its wide variety of species. Fernandez says: “There’s a saying that if you want to make someone laugh, you make them cry, and vice versa. “Pixar is really good at that – every time there’s a painful moment, it’s a few minutes later, and you’re ready to laugh.” Batchelor agrees with a nod: “People were very happy to see this worm alone.” That one shot helped determine how it will feel in the finals.”
