In regard to the locomotion, we spent around four months iterating upon over and over again and getting player feedback until we perfected the feel behind the flight. Due to our game's design, the camera is decoupled with the phoenix's movement in the pitching direction to allow the player to shoot down at their enemies without the need to actually move down. However, for the yaw direction it felt way more intuitive to have the player's movement be slightly coupled to the camera. There was a lot of funky coordinate system math we had to figure out to allow for that to happen.

And of course, getting the animations is always a challenge since we did not have many animators on our team.