This painterly indie game turns a children’s book into a playable illustration

If the hand-painted visuals of The Day I Became A Bird resemble something from an illustrated children's book, then you'd be right. This short narrative-adventure is an adaptation of a 2016 French children's picture book written by Ingrid Chabbert and illustrated by Guridi, about a young boy named Frank who falls in love for the first time with Sylvia, a girl in his class, and devises an unusual way to win her affection.

It's actually the book's second adaptation, as the story was also turned into an acclaimed animated short directed by the multi-Oscar-winning production company Passion Pictures, which gives you a sense of the pedigree the game's developer, Hyper Luminal, is working from.

"We always described the game internally as the third leg of a stool - a stool that collectively told Frank and Sylvia’s story," Hyper Luminal's art manager James Law tells me. "The goal was to honour the visuals of both the other mediums whilst expanding them into areas only games can do. And what a gift to inherit two gorgeous tellings!"

Turning hand-drawn 2D to 3D

While it might have made sense to stay true to the book's aesthetics by making a 2D game with just hand-drawn visuals, it arguably takes after the animated short, which uses 3D while layering in hand-drawn elements, with a bit more colour and detail than the original book. Surprisingly, the short was also made with Unreal Engine, though that doesn't mean the game, made with Unity, can simply take those same assets. (Read our guide to the best game development software.)

"The medium of film allows for a lot of artful cheats, like drawing on top of individual frames, compositing separate elements together, building only the part of the set you see in the shot," Law adds. "We couldn’t do that – all of our scenes had to uphold the hand-drawn tricks and visual fidelity at all times and from several angles, and run well."

"We very carefully studied the results of the short as a holistic effect, and emulated that with our Unity tools, rather than reverse engineering pure Unreal techniques. Blurring vignettes, chromatic aberration, even the edges of shadows, inheriting warm, red stripes or subtle scribbles: everything in the short that contributed to the vibe we paid attention to and carefully rebuilt to work as an optimised world."

The adaptation has received the blessing of the original author and illustrator, and the studio has also had invaluable help from Passion Pictures, which shared many of its art and animation resources to ensure the visuals remained faithful. But Hyper Luminal also had a foundation to start from, as the game shares similarities with another game it made, Pine Hearts, a cosy game with an illustrative style and a similar top-down isometric perspective.

"In a practical sense, we used a lot of the same underlying tooling and systems from Pine Hearts, so if anyone has played that game, then The Day I Became A Bird will feel familiar," says creative director Rob Madden. "But we also wanted The Day I Became A Bird to feel unique, so we chose to play more with the camera and framing this time around. Pine Hearts is always played from the same top-down perspective, but in an effort to tell this story, we had to break away from that."

The Day I Became A Bird arguably leans further into what the devs refer to as 'storybook logic', so instead of invisible walls or environment barriers like other games, the edges of an environment simply fades out to a blank canvas like in an illustration, or among the 3D environments you also see many objects that don't concern the core of the story as just 2D doodles.

"In many of the scenes, only the parts that matter to the story are actually filled in," Law explains. "From the short, we wanted to continue that beautiful, handmade feel in everything - endearingly wonky and very tactile, non-digital. Even the UI was carefully themed to feel like a hand-made scrapbook. Everything was hand-authored where we could, in the spirit of the other adaptations."

The advantage of 3D

Ultimately, he finds that 3D allows for a greater degree of solid, tactile reality, which is also needed for a playable character with a huge suite of animations, especially once the story gets to the point where Frank turns himself into a bird, where he's animated to be deliberately clunky. But when combined with 2D elements, it also creates that magical effect where a drawing has a pop-up book quality.

As an adaptation, Madden considers the game as an experience that supplements the book and the short rather than replacing them. "We spent a lot of time thinking about the core pillars of what made the short unique, and what made the book unique, and then what of those ingredients did we want to make sure the game paid homage to," he concludes.

Given that both the book and the animation are short experiences, the same applies to telling the story in interactive form as succinctly as possible. As Law says, "That's something that the book and short do so well, so the game needed to do too, so it felt as though it shared that DNA."

The Day I Became A Bird is coming to PC soon, and you can play a short demo on Steam.