About This Game

Embark on a mystical journey as a Sparrow, explore enchanted worlds and meet new characters. Level up your character to increase in size and capability. Earn XP by collecting stars and by completing quests, races and challenges.

Caution

• This game has complex controls

• Psychedelic effects are seen and often affect your character

• There is fast movement, and shaking cameras

Story

Sparrow Country offers a casual, short story with light RPG-style mechanics. Explore new areas, meet intriguing characters, and complete challenges and races offered by story figures. In Story Freeform mode, wander around and interact with story characters to maintain the primary storyline. Level up your character to grow larger and increase skill. Collecting stars earns experience and helps advance the primary story.

Other birds and characters in the world interact with you in various ways, offering quests or by being obstacles that slow you down. Story characters engage in light conversations, some may require reading to progress forward.

Master the art of flight by unlocking attributes and abilities through a skill tree, including core, ground, and air skills.

Background

Sparrows in the Phorgle universe are small, nimble, agile and fast. They’re inherit survival instinct keeps them alive effortlessly. Other species can’t catch these Sparrows. So much so, that other species don’t usually notice Sparrows whizzing around their head. The wisping crack of Sparrow’s wings quickly raising up and the whirlwind that follows often startle, triggering others to flee and never glance back. However beware of bugs, often pesky fellas big and small, like nothing more than to slow you down. Here, is Sparrow Country.

Character

In single player, currently you are randomly assigned a Sparrow at birth. In co-op you can pick from 6 Sparrows, whose base attributes are very similar and in several case the same.

Your Sparrow grows in size as they level up. Spend your skill tree tokens to increase skll attributes and unlock additional abilities.

Difficulty

The Story is straight forward and reasonably easy to complete. A speed run would take about an hour. There is no difficulty setting at this time. Depending on a players' controller (or keyboard & mouse) skill level some challenges may be hard. Primary (green) quests are required to finish the game, while most challenges and matches are optional, and have levels of completion like badges, or bronze, silver and gold medallions or trophies.

Gameplay Focus

Sparrow Country focuses on discovery quests, challenges and racing. Players currently do not have ‘lives’ and there is no concept of death. However players may reset or be teleported with naming that reflects the action that displaced them, and in some cases players may have a limited number of resets to complete a challenge successfully.

Energy & Stamina

Sparrows, especially while younglings have limited bursts of energy and require constant monitoring of their stamina to maintain consistent movement. Players have several ways to conserve & restore stamina.

• the world provides various ways to replenish stamina like tumbling into certain bushes and catching berries, entering a plant aura

• speed up recovery time by crouching or flying downwards

Navigation

The game always offers numerous utilities to keep the player informed and instruments to help them navigate. Players should never be lost in Sparrow Country. Players are usually able to reset their character using the escape game menu to a safe location if the character gets stuck or need to get back on track.

Stars & Experience

During the story, collecting and earning stars by completing challenges and matches will increase a Sparrow’s experience points. Players may spend stars to boost their energy, for example using the star burst ability. Stars are also used in certain interactions like a currency with other characters, such as fast travel in Story Freeform mode to quickly get to discovered areas in the region.

Controls

Sparrow Country aims to have arcade style ground and flight mechanics. Controls are reasonably easy to get the hang of, but may be a bit intimidating at first. Access the in-game inventory, and select the ‘Controller’ tab to see game controls.

Stars & Experience

During the story, collecting and earning stars by completing challenges and matches will increase a Sparrow’s experience points. Players may spend stars to boost their energy, for example using the star burst ability. Stars are also used in certain interactions like a currency with other characters, such as fast travel in Story Freeform mode to quickly get to discovered areas in the region.

Skill Tree - Abilities & Attributes

A Sparrow has basic abilities & skill attributes at birth. Players unlock more advanced abilities, and increase skill attributes through the Skill Tree.

Star Burst as an example gives a burst of energy and will continue providing perks for the duration in which its active. This burst lasts until either all stars are depleted or the player chooses to end it to retain their remaining stars to burst again later.

There are only a couple of other abilities, Super Jump and Stomp are unlocked by the skill tree, and allow players to quickly elevate or descend in place consuming stamina.

Base Skill Attributes grow with your character as you level up, however you may also increase attributes by unlocking certain Skill Tree nodes, like the common Stamina node.

Nodes marked Passive increase attributes. Nodes marked Active require a key press, to activate which will have a cooldown duration.

Co-op

Players are able to use Peer-to-Peer networking to play through the story together. Peer-to-Peer means no port forwarding necessary. You are already setup to host a session.

Only 2 players at this time. From the main menu, a host must use ‘Create Lobby' to start a session. The host can invite friends using the in-game steam overlay (shift + tab).

Content Offering

Sparrow Country currently offers:

• The first level and some smaller supporting levels

• 3 Arcade tracks

  • (times are approximate for 1 lap with a level 5 Sparrow)

  • GrassPlains Raceway - 1m

  • Beach Aisles Raceway - 3m

  • Indaga Valley Raceway - 2.5m

  • Some smaller additional tracks are found in the Story

• Several established story chapters with about only 10 minutes total of cutscenes

• Build up to 10 character skill levels to complete the primary story, and continue exploring and replaying quests up to higher levels

• limited inventory support

Updated AI Disclosure (v0.19)

As of 0.19, all AI generated content has been removed. There are no AI generated assets included in Sparrow Country. The Sparrow bird character was textured by hand in Blender, using real world photographic images taken by the author. All screenshots shown in the descriptions are taken directly from the game.

All third party asset packs used in Sparrow Country have declared there was no AI generated content.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Adobe AI was used to generate some textures that were applied to in-game models and textures, and for web content.