Guide

Characters & cosmetics

You play a bird. That sounds like a small design space until you notice that everything else in the game, the flight model, the four abilities, the way the world is laid out, is built around what a bird can do that a person cannot.

Paulie

The bird the game is named after is a real one, a Blue-crowned Conure who lives with the family that built this. The green body, the blue crown, the white ring around the eye and the noise are all his.

He is also, quite literally, the same model everywhere. The bird you fly in the world, the bird in the character panel, and the bird on this website's home page are one asset served from one place. When the model changes in the game it changes here too, because there is only one of it.

Even his voice is real. The chirps and the mimicked words are recordings of the actual bird, dropped into the game as ordinary audio files.

Character slots and identity

You pick a display name and that is who you are in the world: above your head, on the race leaderboards, in whatever fights you pick. Your email address, if you ever add one, is never shown to anyone.

A guest character lives on the device that made it. A signed-in character lives on your account and follows you to any device, with your exact inventory arrangement intact. Signing in later upgrades the guest character you already have rather than starting you over. A free account holds one character, and the progression unlock opens ten slots.

Appearance

Appearance is changed from the Character panel, in a dressing room where the bird stands in front of you and reacts. You can drag him a full circle in any direction, zoom right in, and, because this is a game about a pet, tap him, at which point he chirps in his own recorded voice and a burst of hearts comes off the touch point.

Recolouring

The bird recolours by zone rather than as a single tint. Crown, body, wings and undertail each take their own colour, while the black pupil and the white eye-ring stay exactly as drawn, which is what keeps a recoloured Paulie looking like Paulie. The preset schemes are patterned on real parrots: an African Grey with its signature red undertail, a blue-and-gold Macaw, an Amazon, an Eclectus, a Sun Conure. If you would rather build your own combination, a free-form picker does any colour per zone. "Natural" is free and always there, so reverting costs nothing.

The technical bit is worth one sentence, because it decided what was possible. A naive colour tint muddies feather detail and flattens shading, so recolouring here runs through a zone mask and recomputes the shading. That is why a strongly recoloured bird still has light and depth. The devlog tells the story of measuring the cheap version and throwing it away.

Different birds

Paulie is not the only model. Other birds, the first being a Phoenix, swap in as genuinely different creatures rather than palette variations. Not every model supports recolouring: the Phoenix's painted fire would flatten to mud under a recolour, so it keeps its fixed look on purpose. Supporting something badly is worse than saying no.

Other players see it

Your appearance is visible to everyone in the world, in real time. A recolour you apply now is on the bird other players are looking at within moments, which is the point: cosmetics only you can see are a screensaver. On desktop there is even a Paulie-feather mouse cursor that dyes itself to match your bird.

Gear, and the trade it asks you to make

There is no equipment screen, no armour slots and no gear score. What exists instead is a small number of items that do something while they occupy space you would rather use for something else.

Your bag

Inventory is Minecraft-shaped: a nine-slot hotbar along the bottom of the screen plus a twenty-seven-slot backpack behind the inventory key, stacking to 64 a slot. The arrangement is yours. Items stay exactly where you put them, the layout saves to your account, and it survives both logging out and changing device.

Two rules give the bag its edge. The last hotbar slot permanently holds the Hearthstone, so eight slots are genuinely yours. And while you are in combat the bag locks, so you fight with the loadout you brought and rearrange when it is over.

The Golden Seed

The rarest drop in the game is gear rather than food. A Mythic Golden Seed works only while it sits on your hotbar, giving +5% to your maximum health, maximum energy and Bite damage. One seed per slot, and the bonuses stack, so a hotbar packed with seeds is a serious statistical build that has surrendered almost every food slot to get there. Glass, in exchange for numbers, and the game lets you make that call.

The bonus is a percentage rather than a flat number for a reason. A flat bonus would be overwhelming at level one and a rounding error at the cap, while a percentage holds the same relative value the whole way up. That also keeps player-versus-player fair across levels.

One more thing about seeds. When one drops anywhere in the world, off a creature or out of a defeated player's hotbar, every player online gets a server-wide call-out naming only the rough compass region it fell in. Finding it is the game.

The Hearthstone

The other piece of gear is the way home: a ten-second channelled cast that returns you to The Nest, interrupted by moving, unavailable while flying, and on a fifteen-minute cooldown afterwards. It is deliberately slow enough to be a decision rather than an escape hatch.

Food has its own discipline. Eating anything puts every consumable on a shared cooldown for a handful of seconds, longer for stronger food, so healing is something you time rather than a button you hold.

Earned versus bought

The line is simple, and worth stating with the actual price tags on it.

• Everything that affects a fight is earned. Levels, abilities, the flight ceiling and the Golden Seed all come out of playing, for every player, identically.
• The free game is a real trial: one character, the first ten levels, the whole world. Conure, a single A$2.99 one-time unlock, lifts the level cap to 30, opens ten character slots, and removes ads for good.
• Cosmetics are A$1.99 one-time unlocks: the recolour studio, the feather cursor, alternative birds like the Phoenix. Looks, never numbers.
• Sky Rider (A$4.99, one-time) is everything above at once, plus a title.
• There is nothing else. No subscription, no premium currency, no loot boxes, no bundle that is deliberately the wrong size.

Purchases on the web are not live yet. The store is built, and the merchant arrangement behind it is being finalised. The line above does not move when it opens: a game with race leaderboards and open player-versus-player combat cannot sell an advantage without breaking both. Appearance fits this game unusually well anyway. It is a game about a specific, much-loved bird, and making your own version of him is closer to the point than any statistic would be.