Sharpshooter Devlog: Why I Chose to Have Birds be the Enemies in My Third-Person Shooter

While I was working to rework my map for my sharpshooter game, I gradually realized that there were other things I wanted to change as well. The most glaring of which was the enemy sprites.

For a bit of context, I originally followed a tutorial on how to make a first-person shooter in Unity; before, I decided that I wanted to make my own game. From there, I changed the theme of my game from sci-fi and futuristic which was based on the original tutorial to a green plain covered with hills, trees, a house, ice, water, more ice, and also a design entirely based on my own ideas. This was when I decided I should change my enemy sprite from a robot to a bird. I chose a bird specifically because I felt like my open green space should have an enemy that was down-to-earth, more natural, and maybe even a little silly since my game was in low-poly.

I found a free bird model off of the Unity asset store. It was a brown bird and had some animations for moving and flying. The bird enemy gave me more options for how the enemy would move as well. Because they had a flying animation, I felt it would be a great opportunity to spice up the attack patterns. I changed the code to allow the bird to fly around, circle around you, and try to peck at you when they got close enough.

The bird change may have been just a simple model switch, but it was the start of my independent game development journey.

Original Map

Remade Map