However I stayed on because it was still interesting watching them build and repair their models, with the miniature electronics and servos and all.

Then one day, one of my friends in the club turned to me and asked me to have a go at the flight simulator. I was a little reluctant but in the end I braved the embarrassment. The first few flights didn’t end well, as expected, but after some guidance I wasn’t dropping like rocks.

Fast forward a few days later and I could keep a helicopter afloat reasonably well. Feeling confident I bought myself a nice model helicopter for £30. It was an indoor coaxial that my friends suggested and it didn’t take long to get it to fly.

And then I broke the landing gear from landing too hard.

I fixed it with super glue, and then I broke it again by landing too hard. It can still fly, just that it’s unbalanced with a smashed canopy and is at risk of tipping over while landing without the landing gears. Turns out buying a model helicopter isn’t terribly expensive, it’s the combined cost of replacement parts, which add up to somewhere around half the original price.

So I’m laying off flying for now until my savings recovers, but it was a pretty fun experience.

My work on The Flying Penguin was halted mostly due to the difficulties I have in the game. The biggest problem is that the code itself isn’t that great and after two re-writes I’ve lost the willpower to do another. I feel like I should leave the game as it is and move on to something else more interesting. I might take up interest eventually but that’s unlikely because of the second biggest problem, its similarity to Penguin Learns To Fly. The whole similarity thing was an unfortunate coincidence, but since that flash game is better known, my game would forever be overshadowed by it.

I’m not entirely sure what my next game-making project would be, but given the number of ideas floating in my head, I’m sure I would come up with something eventually.