Lead a feathered rebellion in the bird-filled deckbuilder SPARROW WARFARE! Combine your tiles to free birds. Unlock wildtiles to craft riotous combos. Take down the fiendish Storyteller for the liberation of all!
Factsheet
🔭 Developer/Publisher: NEON AURELIUS
📈 Status: Alpha playtest
🎭 Genre: Single-player Deckbuilder
🌍 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
📆 Release Date: Q2 2026
🛼 Platform: Steam
🚂 Engine: Godot
💃 Socials: Discord, Bluesky, YouTube
👋 Want to get in touch? Chat with Char at hello@neonaurelius.com
About Sparrow Warfare
🐦⬛ Sparrow Warfare is a deckbuilder game with roguelite elements, inspired by the popular tile-based game mahjong. The player character is a tiny sparrow fighting for freedom against a fiendish foe known as The Storyteller, who has trapped all of the birds in mahjong tiles.
In the game, you collect and combine tiles using mahjong rules to free the trapped birds. Freeing birds rewards you with new wildtiles. Our 150+ wildtiles are the secret sauce which unlock the meta-game of building synergies.
🦅 It's a deckbuilder... with birds! Combine sets of 3 tiles together using mahjong-inspired rules. Craft powerful synergies to free 100+ birds. Choose exciting rewards from freed birds to strategically upgrade your deck. Battle your way through 6 distinct biomes, each one guarded by a malevolent boss.
🦉 Wildtiles make the magic: The secret sauce? Free birds to get new wildtiles, which unlock insane metagaming combos! Every choice matters. With over 150+ wildtiles to discover, experiment with game-breaking wildtile synergies. You’ll keep coming back for just… one… more… flight.
🦆 Ways & means: We have 4 playable Ways to challenge you with. Which Way will your sparrow choose? Fire burns. Song charms. Water multiplies. Ghosts protect. Each of the 4 Ways offers unique tiles, new wildtile combinations, and distinct playstyles and strategies.
🕊️ How high can you fly? We have a regular game with a balanced progression system, in addition to a daily flight mode with different challenging modifiers and global leaderboards. Sparrow Warfare offers endless replayability, as every game is a new beginning where every tile choice matters!
Media & Assets
All media and assets (including layered .psd files) can be found in this folder. All assets are available for press and streamers to use under Creative Commons CC4.0 attribution.
About the team
We are a truly tiny team making Sparrow Warfare: just 2 fellow bird-loving, majhong-playing, deckbuilder-fanatics Martin Pichlmair and Charlene Putney.
Dr. Martin Pichlmair is a game developer, game educator, and media artist with many years of experience in the games industry. Recently, he spent 10 years as Associate Professor on the games programme at ITU Copenhagen. He is also a veteran entrepreneur with several games studios under his belt, including the multi-award-winning Austrian studio Broken Rules. He really likes hot food.
Charlene Putney is an award-winning games writer and teacher. After working at Google and Facebook in management positions, she’s been writing for video games since 2013, including writing for Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, NUTS, and Saltsea Chronicles. She has taught writing for games at Trinity College, DIT, ITU Copenhagen, KADK Copenhagen, and many conferences and events (including teaching quantum scientists at CERN about interactive fiction!). She also teaches a free online yoga class every Tuesday called One Calm Hour.
Together, Charlene and Martin are creating their new studio, NEON AURELIUS, with one mission in mind: to craft your next beloved pastime. Martin wants you to know that this is “the best game I’ve ever worked on”, as “we’ve spent a lot of time making this game as friction-less as possible. Easy in, easy out. Super approachable, but boy does it get complex when you want to get to the end or compete in the leaderboards”. And Char adds "I always wanted to work on a game that makes the white noise machine in my brain go BRRRRRRR! and now I have."