Chirp

Chirp is a small technical demo pioneering the exploration of restorative design; how to build games which give players more energy than they take.

This demo centres around connecting with birds by mimicking their songs, in a relaxing natural environment.

I created all assets. Made in UE5.

Overview

Studio

Personal

Role

Solo Developer

Platform

Date

2026

Key Skills

Creature AI

Gameplay Design

Prototyping

Art Development

A moodboard containing watercolour images of houses and birds, and screenshots of monument valley.

I wanted to create a soothing world.

For me, Monument Valley has always had a calming effect with its soft gradients, minimal backgrounds and low levels of detail.

I found further inspiration in the works of Jean Payton Reid, a Scottish architect from the early 1900s, and Claire Harkness a Scottish watercolour artist of today.

I generated trees through math.

To quickly mock-up different trees for environment tests, I built a Blueprint which fractally creates branches along generated splines.

I wanted artistic control over realism, so I used instanced structs to expose the config in the editor. I can add as many layers of branches as I'd like, set them to be straight, bowed, or spiral, and fine tune their appearance.

Once happy with their appearance, I merge the Blueprint down into a single static mesh.

The leaves were also generated, by spawning instanced static meshes with-in a deformable sphere.

Spline points are overlayed on the trunk and branches of a tree, which can be configured from the details panel.

And turned day to night.

I moved radial gradients across the flat plane background to simulate the sun and moon.

As the day progresses, alongside the background updating, the lighting and shadow colours change to reflect these different time periods.

Six screenshots show the progression of lighting from a pink dawn, to bright morning, to yellow afternoon, a golden dusk, a purple evening, and a dark night.

I made the birds fluffy.

Same assets, different materials. I softened and feathered the outline to give a soft scattering effect to their plumage.

Two robins sit on fenceposts. One is smooth with cel-shading highlights, the other fluffy with matte highlights.

A comparison of a tree and landscape with default Unreal shadows, and post-processed purple shadows.

And turned the shadows purple.

Purple shadows are a traditional watercolour technique, which adds depth to an image without darkening it.

I achieved a similar result by tinting the shadows purple through a post-processing material.

A selection of birds perch on tree branches.