Take Flight 3

Take Flight 3's current thumbnail on Scratch.

*“Scratch & friends are back for their best flight yet!”*
    —Take Flight 3's official tagline

*Take Flight 3* is the third entry in the *Take Flight* series, following *Take Flight 2*.

## Gameplay

The gameplay of *Take Flight 3* remains similar to *Take Flight* and *Take Flight 2*, but with a few key differences. The player must navigate an infinite obstacle course that gets faster as the game progresses. They are tasked with getting a high score by collecting coins or items.

The player starts with 8 health points, which can be raised up to a maximum 10. If the player collides with an enemy, they lose 2 health. If they touch a dangerous liquid, such as lava or poison, they lose 1 health. If their health reaches 0, the game is over.

There are six characters, each with a unique item (with one exception). Along with that, there are 5 stages, each with a different enemy.

### Characters

*WIP*

Items
 Timer
 Super Planet
 Cloaking Device
 Dual Masks

### Stages

*WIP*

Enemies
 Beetle
 Skelebat
 Fireball
 UFO

## Development

### Original concept

The original concept idea for *Take Flight 3* was to make a *Take Flight* game in the graphical style of the Sega Genesis. It also would have been a much farther departure from the previous *Take Flight* games with a full story and shoot-'em-up style gameplay. Another major idea was to have platforming levels in-between flying segments. This would be because the main character, Scratch, had lost the ability to fly. One working title for this idea was "Take Flight: Start From Scratch", which would turn out to be bizarre foreshadowing.

### Early development

In November of 2021, S. Cabbage and m4ly3g created a simple gameplay demo from the ground up. One notable difference in this demo to past *Take Flight* games includes looping backgrounds as opposed to many different randomly-spawning background elements. Another difference is there being ground at the bottom of the screen. Later demos added enemies, coins, and the ability to shoot projectiles. Eventually, it was decided that coins would act as both currency and ammo.

Once the flight gameplay was deemed complete, S. Cabbage moved on to developing the platforming. He followed a tutorial made by a Scratch user named Griffpatch. However, he eventually determined it would be too complex to have both the flight segments and the platforming engine in a single project and scrapped the idea. Instead, he reused parts of the flight code to create an infinite runner style of gameplay.

### Episode 1

At some point during development, it was decided to make *Take Flight 3* an episodic release in which each episode would contain around 2-4 levels. The Sega Genesis style was also dropped in favor of a lineless vector style. The release date for episode 1 was originally planned to be in Fall of 2022, but it was eventually pushed back to Spring of 2023 since S. Cabbage's PC was having issues at the time.

In May of 2022, around the time S. Cabbage had finished the base that he would use to build each episode, a teaser trailer was released that showed off some of the elements of the game. One of these was the new design of the main character, Scratch. This design bore resemblance to the character designs from *Sonic the Hedgehog*, an homage to the game's Sega Genesis roots. This teaser also showed the designs of four different villains that were planned to be in the game, as well as confirming Tera as a playable character.

Shortly after the teaser released, S. Cabbage announced that he was once again aiming for a Fall 2022 release. However, after Fall came and went, nothing came out. The first episode had quietly been put on hold indefinitely.

### Relaunch

In late 2022, S. Cabbage began development on *One More Game*, which later released in February of 2023. Inspired by the success of that project, he completely restarted Take Flight 3's development from the beginning later that month. He decided to make something closer to the first two games with the lineless style he had been developing. He wrote all of his ideas down on a sheet of lined paper. Notable ideas that made it into the final game include various level themes and fast-paced gameplay. In about two months of development, the game was almost ready for release.

### Music

Originally, *Take Fight 3* would have used music from the *Skylanders* series of games. However, the plan shifted after *One More Game* used original music. First, S. Cabbage tried to get help with music from his friends and members of the Scratch community. However, after that didn't work (aside from one song that had help from Beemp3), he decided to make the music himself. The style of music consisted of 8-bit tunes inspired by retro video games. Each song would have to be less than a minute long due to Scratch's limitations, so he made sure to fit as much in that time as possible.

### Release

*Take Flight 3* released on Friday, April 21, 2023. S. Cabbage usually released games and updates on Fridays, but this one in particular happened to be his 15th birthday. Upon release, the game received moderate attention, but it hadn't yet reached the level of *One More Game*. However, that didn't matter to S. Cabbage. As he put it, he was just glad that the game had finally released.

### Updates

After the game's launch, it received two major updates. The first, released on May 12th, added Nano and Nova as unlockable characters as well as Planet Kiran as an unlockable stage. In the same update, the GUI was updated to be more streamlined. The second update released on May 24th and added a multiplayer mode. By this time, the game had received more attention, far greater than any before.