BeardyBird is three people in a Sydney garage studio: programmer Tomasz, artist Rin, and composer Mara. Star Jolt is their second title and the one that stuck. We sat down with all three after the game crossed five million downloads.
On the eighteen months of physics
"The slingshot took the longest by far," Tomasz says. "We rebuilt the gravity model four times. The first version felt like a slot machine. The breakthrough was making the pull field a cone instead of a sphere; suddenly depth meant risk, and risk meant score."
On the look
Rin's art direction started with a VHS tape of a 1984 arcade cabinet. "The brief was: it should look like a memory of the 80s, not a photo of them. That is why the palette is all deep navy and signal cyan and hazard red. Nothing pastel, nothing cute."
"It should look like a memory of the 80s, not a photo of them."
Rin, art directorOn no ads, ever
"An interstitial in a sixty-second game is an insult," says Mara, flatly. "The model is free with cosmetics. It works because the people who love the game buy skins to support it, and everyone else plays free forever. We will not put ads in. That is written into our own heads, permanently."
On the Australia angle
The Australian portal exists because roughly a third of the player base is in the Oceania timezone. "Our Discord was dead at our lunch and on fire at our midnight," Rin laughs. "Star Jolt AU is us admitting where the players actually live."
On what is next
The roadmap they will commit to: co-op ghost challenges, a sector editor for the community, and one more sector they will only describe as 'the one that scared us to build'. Patch 1.4's Omega sector is the start of that thread.