In Flock, you are a bird in a flock of birds that seems to trust you at least as much as you make good decisions. They tend to follow you around if you look like you know what you're doing and they will eat any butterfly in sight. Some butterflies are healthy, some are fun to eat, and some are poisonous. Unfortunately, the birds don't remember which one is which and after they finish eating a group of butterflies, they often don't know where to go next! Fortunately for you, you were born with a butterfly finder in your brain and you can find new groups of butterflies instantly and you know exactly which butterflies are good for your flock, which butterflies they love to eat, which butterflies are bad for them, and most importantly, which butterflies give you the most points.
Even though you have these wonderful talents, the flock still often questions your decisions. If you dart off without waiting for them, they may not follow you and if you lead them towards poisonous butterflies, they will start to lose confidence in your decisions once they start seeing their flockmates dropping to the ground. It's your responsibility to keep you and your flock together and alive for as long as possible.
Flock was written in the fall of 2002 by Eric Berger and David Chan for Stanford's CS248, taught by Marc Levoy. It won the "Most Creative" award in the 4th Annual CS248 Video Game Competition.
The engine for Flock is quite sophisticated. The terrain that you fly over is generated analytically and the terrain engine is so robust that you can fly in any direction forever. The grass that you swoop through is really there, swaying gently in the calm breeze. Those trees that you fly around are procedurally generated and billboarded when needed. Those birds are flying using realistic flocking algorithms similar to those used in Batman Returns and The Lion King. More details on these features and more can be found in our details page.
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Flock-bin.zip (8MB) - Windows.
system requirements
1.8Ghz
512mb
GeForce4 Ti4200
Copyright 2002 Eric Berger, David Chan