A little fireman game

I just started working on a fireman game for my son who is turning three soon. He likes helicopters and firefighters so I wanted to find a Leapster video game about that but I couldn't.
Then I thought I might be able to do some homebrew for the leapster. I found out that they might be using embedded flash but in the same post I learned that Leapfrog did not want any homebrew.

So I thought I would just use what was most convenient and easiest for me and installed pygame on my EEE PC. Pygame makes it really easy to work with sprites and offers a pretty good level of abstraction (sprites, transformations of 2D images, collision routines and custom events).

My graphics are pretty lame at the moment. I have not drawn on a computer since my Atari ST days and I am afraid I wasn't really awesome at the time either. I am using Kolourpaint as Gimp and Krita seemed to complicated for me. I miss the layers though, so I might switch back later on.

Sound is pretty hard. I always thought I could voice pretty cool helicopter sound effects but when I listen to myself in Audacity or in the game I am less impressed actually. I also have issues with looping as I can hear a click.

Still, I am pretty happy with my results so far and I have more ideas for educational games for my kids.

The current one is really simple: press 'w' and the helicopter goes to a lake to fetch water in its bucket, press 'f' to go drop the water on the fire. Iterate. When the fire is gone, you can press 'l' to land at the firefighter station.

I think this game is still pretty good for a really young kid and I hope it will be motivating enough to let my son learn letter/key associations.

I have other ideas:
- firetruck with ladder game. Use number pad to lift the ladder to the right level on a building
- helicopter game seen from above to teach my son about maps as he has shown some interest and understanding when looking at Google maps on my Blackberry.