Introducing: Flying is Hard

I get bored of projects really easily. My computer is literally a graveyard of game prototypes in various stages of completion. A month or so ago I was thinking about 3D Touch on iOS and in what ways you could utilise it for interesting controls in a game, and after a whole lot of not coming up with anything the idea of jet engines and thrust kept popping into my head; so I decided to play around with that concept. What I got was the following; a little alien blasting around with upward thrust being mapped to 3d touch and horizontal movement mapped to moving your finger left and right.

As it turns out, this combination makes for some pretty enjoyable movement! I decided to try to expand upon the idea by throwing in a sort of section/waypoint system and some obstacles for the alien to avoid. Unsurprisingly it only improved things!

My plan is to have the core loop involve different worlds, each one with multiple stages that are made up of a series of sections, each section being a sort of movement puzzle that takes up only a single screen. The context is you are trying to escape certain situations; and completing each section will unlock the next until there are no more left in that stage. I think this will allow me to have some fun with level design and I think it will give me a lot of options in terms of obstacles.

I made a temporary little pixel art space ship to replace Kenney's alien dude to try to start capturing that mood, and prototyped out a potential first 3 sections for the first stage. These are meant to be used for teaching the player how to control the character in some mostly safe environments.

I also added some variable intensity pixel art flames in for good measure!

I haven't decided whether or not the game will be brutally difficult or not; that said I am planning on also forking the codebase and having a PC/Mac/Linux port of the game with bigger stages and more exploration, so perhaps that may be a better avenue to add increased difficulty.

That's all for now! Stay tuned for more Flying is Hard logs, and maybe follow along on twitter @bengsfort.