Each form has some unique properties, hummingbirds slow down time, sparrows fly through trees, eagles dive and snatch prey, and have enhanced sight, Geese speed up time to travel long distances, penguins swim, ostriches, parrots can talk to people, etc.. All the birds you meet along the way will bow to you.
Flight details are massaged to make sure that your character seems competent: obstacle avoidance is built in to some extent, hawks won't smash into the ground, etc.. Of course if you "die" you just disappear in a puff of magical feathers and reappear as a seagull soaring out of the clouds above where you died. As you progress you gain spiritual strength, which you spend to transform and use other divine tricks, but your physical body must also be maintained by eating and drinking periodically. If you're a good girl we'll eventually let you turn into a terror bird or a velociraptor or a phoenix or roc.
There's a loose story but the game is mostly a sandbox, where you can fly around and find things to do in most directions. We'll use some American Gods tricks and some others to make sure that wherever you go, that's where you need to be. As you progress and solve more problems and earn more forms you learn what your real goal is, but throughout we want to keep the focus on the joy of flight.
I had ideas for a game where the main character is a bird of one kind or another (from an email I wrote some months ago, the idea was an iPhone game):
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The main characters would be something
unconventional, something that would appeal to girls, a character for
each level in its own setting: laughing kookaburra eating gumdrops in
the outback/eucalyptus forests of Australia, a raven in the deserts,
juniper-pinyon forests, and mesas and canyons (ruins?) of the American
southwest, a hopping/gliding Turaco in the canopy of the Madagascar
jungle, a Hyancinth macaw in the grasslands/jungles of the Yucatan [edit: Aztec ruins!],
and an Abyssinian Ground Hornbill eating snakes in the savannah of
Africa, a penguin in the Antarctic (on land and on ice platforms and
swimming in the sea), an owl hunting at night in grasslands, etc.
I've always said how great it would be to be a bird in these
beautiful areas and I think it could be possible to create a rich
experience from that idea.
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Just some more ideas for more specific bird species.
I should add that according to Planet Earth, hornbills scamper around in the wake of brush fires and snatch up the fleeing creatures: lizards, snakes, etc. So maybe their ability could be "fire proof" ("fool hardy?")
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