From page to screen: How did The Day I Became a Bird become a video game?

Last week, while we were in the British capital attending London Games Fest's New Game Plus event, developer Hyper Luminal Games and Passion Pictures were on-hand to spotlight their cosy adventure, The Day I Became a Bird. The story book-inspired title happened to launch last week too, on April 16, making for a perfect marriage of opportunities, something we took advantage of by getting the chance to speak with Passion Pictures about the project.

In an interview with producer Karen Troop, we got to learn more about the delightful and cosy game, including how it came to be. It turns out, the journey was quite a fortunate and inspiring one, involving the Bologna Book Festival of all things.

"So, Andrew Ruerman, who is the founder of Passion Pictures, he originally... he basically found the book at the Bologna Book Festival, and he previously had done this with another film that had been very successful, he actually won an Oscar for, called The Lost Thing, where he'd found the book at the festival, turned it into an animated short and won an Oscar. So, he thought, I will go back to the Bologna Book Festival and do the same thing."

Troop continues: "He came across this book, was immediately drawn to it, and then ended up working with Epic Games because they were looking to find ways to bring more stylised animation into Unreal Engine.

"So, that was turned into this short film. It's a really lovely 15-minute animation, which, incidentally, you get as DLC with the game, if you buy the game, which we thought was... Yeah, we just thought that was a lovely little thing to do. And then I came along as EP in the games team, and immediately went, there's a cosy game here. It really confused everybody at the animation studio, because, you know, it wasn't their first pick for the kind of things that might make a game, and there's not a lot of huge gamers there and things like that. So, I pulled this one out, everybody got very confused, and then I went away and made a game."

So does this make The Day I Became a Bird's video game adaptation a lucky coincidence or simply a product of when opportunity meets preparation? Regardless of how the game came to be, you can now play it on PC and even watch the Oscar-winning short film that is included with the full game. And speaking of watching, catch our full interview with Troop below.