The Flying Platypus

Quite sad this one, Flying Platypus was made while on holiday on a winter break, we had gone to Northumberland in Feb and it was snowing so I had a lot of hours to kill in the evening. The Platypus was in my sketch book and he seemed right to be turned into a game. I was still pretty poor at programming so it was a case of finding a game genre which was reasonably easy to make and could be done in a few days.

Distance games are always popular (games where you fire a character and are scored over distance) and they dont really take too long to make. I was also a big fan of Ferry Halims excellent Winter Bells which had been cloned to death by various digital agencies (and the chinese olympics game, but we wont go into that!). So the basic design was part distance part winter bells. The platypus has an initial launch and then can pick up food bonses by flapping/flying to get them.

The game for what is it has done fantastically, last count it had been played 3+ million times, it also got a daily award on newgrounds, which considering the dev time was really good. I was also pretty pleased with how the artwork came off as it does have a really nice cartoon style to it and was definitely my best game at the time.