What to do now?

Pigs Can Fly is a successful game, but not quite a hit. The reason being it is a puzzle game and lacks challenge, scoreboards, more levels, etc. Players say it is too easy or too hard, so there needs to be more variety in level design.

There is a small demand for the game on the iPhone, but I will not simply port it over so suddenly. I want to pursue at least one other game idea I have so I can grow as an artist, and then do a proper sequel with more game mechanics and a level editor when the time is right. Plus, the game is sponsored and I want the sequel to be independent, with maybe some non-exclusive licenses sold on the side.

Interestingly, the most time consuming part of making this game were the levels themselves. Looking back they are pretty trivial, but man, it can take a long time to come up with 25 of them. I did it all of them through Adobe Flash CS5 and exported each as a swc, so my tiny engine can parse the names of the movie clips and handle them systematically. The small circles are anchor points for creating joints that I hard code for each level with some utility functions.



I did not come up with the idea of Pigs Can Fly until well after the prototype, which, yuck, looked like this:



And there was a button to reset the level and create another cursor for recording (allowing hundreds of cursors), but players would cheat by trying to do everything with just one cursor. I needed a round fat animal to be the circle so I chose a pig. I needed to limit the cursors so I made them color coded. The rest is history.

I'm thinking my next game will include vehicle physics in some way. I've improved my skill in taking a photograph and turning it into a cartoon version, so I'm thinking I could really knock out a dozen of them at least.



And sometimes I do main menus while listening to music to come up with ideas. Maybe this could be for a dungeon crawler or defense game featuring zombies and skeletons?