Tuesday 11 February 2014

Flappy Bird


I recently posted about a national scheme, Year of Code that encourages people to get into coding. I bet Flappy Bird will have a bigger impact than Year of the Code, because the game earned $50,000 each day and it took only 3 days to code (as claimed by the developer) . There must be an whole bunch of people out there thinking $50,000 a day for such a simple game!

If you are a novice programmer, welcome! Don't get disheartened when you realise it's going take you longer than 3 days! Heck you'll spend a week getting Eclipse and Android SDK up and running. Most disheartening of all is that apps better than Flappy Bird will get hardly any downloads and earn a pittance, in fact this is the case for most apps on the market. Why some apps go viral is a mystery and seems more like a lottery.

To see how long it takes to create an Android game, I considering creating an App based on the Atari Classic Dodge 'Em.




Before I begin, I need to consider the following:


  1. How will the user control the car, on screen buttons, swipe or tilt? I will have to spend a lot time play testing to see what works best.
  2. Clearly the graphics need to be updated, I'm pretty poor at graphic design so I still need to keep it simple, I think I can manage with Dodge 'Em tho!
  3. Shall I use a game engine or roll my own. Either way I've got some learning to do.


And lastly I need some spare time!!
Pig Dog Bay




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