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[JasonPKaplan]

You are a very angry chicken and you are running away from the farm!
Navigate the terrain and other animals to avoid the farmers... your only weakness.

Original design and development by Jason P. Kaplan.
Art and animation by Damian Sommer.
Sound and music by Troy Morrisey and Ryan Cox.

Listen to the (old) "Flew the Coop" Theme!

Check out our gameplay video!

App Store

Website | Facebook | Twitter

Flew The Coop is an endless runner similar to Canabalt, but freakin' adorable as it has cute farm animals and a kinda off-putting farmer, who dictates the only lose condition in the game; get caught and your run ends.
Otherwise, bumping into animals freezes control for a short while and reduces speed.  You can run along the backs of animals and buildings and bounce off pigs and hitting weather vanes gives a temporary massive speed boost.
Score is determined by distance traveled, so score increases faster the faster you are traveling. It's one-button input; tap anywhere on the screen to jump, tap and hold to jump higher, tap and keep holding to max out the jump and flutter on the way down.  If you let go and press again, the flutter resumes.  Time a tap on the bounce of a back of a pig to bounce higher.

Flew The Coop supports Game Center on iOS and if it does well will likely be ported to Android, WP7, and possibly XBLIG, Steam, or Mac App Store. (Hooray for cross-platform engines!)

[erakko]

Sounds interesting, despite the lack of information. Artstyle sure looks sweet :) Looking forward to hear more.

[Droqen]

Artstyle sure looks sweet :)

It's settled, Damian. There is nobody who can resist this style.

Hey, Jason :3 Good luck with this, you two peoples.

[Xion]

when you say navigate other animals, does that mean I can duck through the legs of larger animals, because if it doesn't it should.

[JasonPKaplan]

I just posted the rough theme for the game.  It's up in the main post, and again here. Enjoy!

@erakko Thanks! Information will be coming soon, in a slow trickle, in an attempt to match it up with development.

@Droqen Hey back atcha.  Yeah, Damian's art is awesome.  Have you seen anything else he's done for this?  There is a picture that you should see, if you haven't.  Perhaps Damian will post it later.

@Xion You are right; it should.  It didn't, but this has prompted some brainstorming on how it could potentially work.  Perhaps a small design change is in order.  Thanks for the feedback! :)

[Wyrmling]

Hey guys! I'm the artist, the flash version maker person, and am helping with design for this game. I've lurked TIGSource for 4 years now, and have been making games for 10 years using various Clickteam products (Games Factory, Multimedia Fusion, Multimedia Fusion 2).

I'm just doodling random things right now, but by Sunday I should have some concept screenshots or something.

Jason mentioned a picture I should post. I am going to withhold posting it. It shall remain a mystery for now. Whatever could it be?

[JasonPKaplan]

On account of some progress (finally!) I've updated our status up the the first bar, 10%.

This is terribly exciting.

So, why the holdup?  I'll tell you.

My background is largely Windows programming.  Having spent some time with a company doing iPhone dev, I thought myself able to do iPhone dev solo.  So I got me a license, got me my Xcode, looked into engines, picked Cocos2D, and got to work.

...Hah.  What I failed to realize is just how much I relied on the proprietary C++ engine we used at the company.  Without that, I was a fish out of water in the seas of iPhone dev.  Utilizing online tutorials and the like, I made some progress... but, frankly, I was stuck on errors and frustrated and thus giving up far too often, so I decided to look into alternatives.

I'm currently working in MonoDevelop with XnaTouch (as I am rather familiar with XNA).  Is this the best option?  Not so much.  But it's likely to allow me to get a functional game made, quickly, and that counts for something.

I've got a basic state structure, touch input works, and Damian and I have discussed some art planning, so animated sprites are coming up soon.  I hope to have a playable prototype in the next week or so, but I know full well that this could actually be more like three or four weeks, especially with #GPCv3 coming up next week... but I'll try!

Stay tuned.

[JasonPKaplan]

The past day and a half has been, on my end, the writing of Sprites, Animation Management for Sprites, and then a singleton Sprite Management for the game (loading in from XML).  I'm pretty pleased with how it's come together, though it still needs some testing to make sure it, you know, all works.  Anyway, just wanted to share.

...Oh, right, I guess we still haven't said anything about what the game actually is.  I don't know if this term is actually used, but I've heard Damian say it in regards to our game, so I'll tell you it as though it means something: the game is an autorunner.

dun dun dun

[JasonPKaplan]

We just created a Facebook and Twitter for the game (see the main post for links), and posted some early concept art for your enjoyment:







Stay tuned for more!

[JasonPKaplan]

Yeah, so, there's a chain of randomly generated farm animals now, which is something.  So I'ma go ahead and update this to 20%.  I need to work a lot harder, since I wanted this done in half a month from now (not happening, let's call it end of April now).

[JasonPKaplan]

Okay.  So.  In the past few days we've done pretty much twice as much work as was done in all the time that we spent before the past few days, for various reasons.  So I'll bump the completion again.

I put up a screenshot for the game a couple weeks back, as it was, but the art style is somewhat changing and so I'm reluctant to post it now.

In any case.  There are now cows of multiple colours, pigs you can bounce off of, roofs to run along, scarecrows which are purely decorations but worth a mention, the farmer has been very briefly implemented but needs work still, and... yeah.  Stuff.

I'll post more on Sat, at which point we should have a playable in-house build and something nicer to look at for y'all.

I know I haven't said much about the game, but if you have questions, feel free to ask, and I'll answer what I can.

[Superb Joe]

i have angry birds on my phone but i try to embody first world sloth and wastefulness as much as possible so i don't actually play it, i hope this assists you in some way

[JasonPKaplan]

i have angry birds on my phone but i try to embody first world sloth and wastefulness as much as possible so i don't actually play it, i hope this assists you in some way

It absolutely does not but I like your style and so I'm going to say "good hustle" and offer up 10 points.

You may use said points to redeem further "good hustle"s with varying levels of intensity, depending on the number of points you offer up.

[JasonPKaplan]

Due to the recent artstyle change, this little gal may never end up in the game... at least, not in this form.  Since I shared it over on FB/Twitter, thought I'd share it here, too.

[JasonPKaplan]

So I know I haven't really been posting here as much as I probably should have, but... hey, we're almost done beta.  Soon we'll be looking for people with devices to give us their UDID for testing, so, if you're interested, let us know.