[apitaru]

I think Flappy Bird is a wonderfully well-tuned game. I've yet to see a clone that implements the finer details which made the original shine.

Many games introduce difficulty through complexity. Here's a game that's simple to grasp, hard to play, yet not boring or frustrating.

I wish this was acknowledged more often, as it might have made the developer feel more comfortable being associated with his game's meteoric success.

[OmarIsmail]

Agreed 100%.

That's something that's becoming more evident to me with each new clone that pops up.

The pipe gap, the distance between the pipes, the relationship between the height of your flap and gap of the pipes. The tuning of the gravity, etc.

It's all incredibly well done and it's why it's so engaging. If I were to make a clone I would copy all of these properties exactly.

[montag]

Let distance between ground and top of screen=100. Bird position after a flap at y=y0, time=t0:

y(t) = y0 + 13.8 - 147 * (t - t0 + 0.288)^2

[KVFinn]

>I think Flappy Bird is a wonderfully well-tuned game. I've yet to see a clone that implements the finer details which made the original shine.

>Many games introduce difficulty through complexity. Here's a game that's simple to grasp, hard to play, yet not boring or frustrating.

I don't think Flappy Bird is any better tuned or has a better feel than any number of games. I have played many, many games far better on a Ti-85 and they don't even stand out.

And it is boring. There's no escalation or change over time. Once you can get to 50 you can get to 100 or 200. It's like bouncing a ball on a paddle and trying to get the highest score.

I would suggest http://terrycavanaghgames.com/maverickbird/ if you are looking for something better.

[apitaru]

Right, to my taste it's a better game (though very differently tuned beyond the puck-through-a-gap idea).

More than anything I was trying to respond to the parent's question about why the game works at all, especially compared to so many bad single-switch games in the app store.

(In writing this I just realized - Maverick Brid is not a single switch game like Flappy Bird. Not that it matters - even without the dive key it's superior).

[Guillaume86]

+1 When I got an iPod Touch (1st gen before the iPhone even came out), I installed a helicopter game on the same principle (itself cloned from some flash game), but easier at the start and with progressive difficulty, me and my classmates were hooked, played this for hours. It was way better than Flappy Bird except for the design IMO.

[phaus]

Flappy Bird is a clone itself. There were a few different flash/java games that features almost identical gameplay. IMO, helicopter game was the best of these.

helicoptergame.net

Flappy bird actually is supposed to be a troll, and that's why its so popular. People found its ridiculous difficulty to be funny, and that's why the game went viral.

I agree with the other commenter that it isn't well-tuned at all. The hit-detection is so bad that it ruins the game.

[scrabble]

I think it's a disservice to call it a clone of the helicopter game.

It's a very similar idea, but how the game is played and the consistency of the obstacles are very different.

[phaus]

I think its a disservice that millions of people act like this guy stumbled on a new genre when he didn't.

The way the game is played is nearly identical. You either increase your altitude or decrease it.

I agree that the consistency of the obstacles is different though.

[nacs]

Every "genre" and gametype you could ever think of has already been done to some extent by someone in the last few decades so to discredit him because it's not a "new genre" is silly.

Also, it doesn't really matter if he did something already done or not. What matters is that he did it in a way that was seen as better by a significant amount of people.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I'm calling you on this one. It might not be obvious to us right now, but new game genres will continue to sprout up. Touch (included pinch, swipe, etc.) as an input mechanism is new enough that many genres have only come into being in the past few years or so. Games like Osmos and Kosmo Spin are pretty much unique, the latter I just can't imagine working on anything other than touch. People have surely been saying that all genres have been covered in every medium for the last 60 years, yet new ideas keep getting created.

[rjd]

I can remember playing what is essentially the same game on an acorn computer in 80s, pretty sure a helicopter. All this talk is just a witch hunt by jealous people, ignoring how rare original ideas actually are.

[aarongolliver]

I believe SF cave came before the helicopter game, and I'm sure if even that was the first of the genre.

http://www2.sunflat.net/en/games/sfcave.html

http://www2.sunflat.net/en/games/sfcave3d.html

3D SF cave is my favorite by far.

[jerf]

I'm pretty sure I saw something recognizably similar to this used as a sample program for the Commodore 64 in Compute's Gazette.

[rurounijones]

I played a game like this when I was in school around 1990.

I think we had a game like this on BBC Micros

[phaus]

Thanks. I'll have to check this one out. I guess helicopter game wasn't the first, which makes it even more ridiculous that people are acting like this is something new.

[mey]

How is this game not frustrating? The hit box on the bird is the size of the moon, making it very hard to determine where you will "collide" with the pipes.

[drcode]

Every time the user dies they know it's their own fault.

[phaus]

As the commenter you are responding to mentioned, the hit-box is much larger than the bird.

If your hit-boxes aren't the same size as your sprites, players are frequently going to die when they didn't even appear to hit the pipes. So no, it isn't always the user's fault.

[e28eta]

I found the hitbox so frustrating I took an airplay video of several games and was surprised when instant replay showed a 1 pixel collision between the bird and the pipe, when I thought I was clear.

The conspiracist in me wanted to believe the pipes had additional gravity or something that caused me to hit, but practically speaking I wonder if we're simply used to games making hitboxes smaller than the avatar. I certainly noticed that in Jetpack Joyride.

[tripzilch]

> I wonder if we're simply used to games making hitboxes smaller than the avatar.

Yes, it's an often-used trick to enhance the feel of gameplay. Generally you want to make the hitbox of the player, and of the "bad" things smaller, and the hitbox of "good" things (items etc) larger.

This is all (just one) part of the philosophy that the game should behave as the player intends to control it, which is not always equivalent with the literal interpretation of how the player controls it.

Another example is jumping in platform games, if you walk off the edge of a platform, many games will give you a few frames of leeway in which you can still jump, even if the character is actually in mid-air. (alternatively a game can make the platforms' hitbox slightly larger than they appear, but in my experience the leeway approach makes for smoother gameplay)

All of these tricks basically make a game easier to play, but in a way that feels very satisfactory to the player. The idea being, you can always make up for the level of difficulty by making the levels harder, the enemies faster, etc. This shifts the balance from hardness by frustration to challenge.

The fact that Flappy Bird obviously subverts this philosophy, I think is part of its wtf-intrigue. Whether the author of the game did it on purpose or not, is another question.

[aardshark]

It seems to be exactly the size of the bird to me.

[mey]

This is an issue of lack of telegraphing (non-verbal queue/instruction/feedback) the area around the bird that will cause the player to fail. To get "good" at flappy bird the player has to build their own mental model around the bird that represents failure. (In the actual version of the game not this MMO version which has a nice little white bubble)

[johnward]

The game itself is just a clone of the helicopter flash games. Which is probably a clone of something else.

http://www.addictinggames.com/action-games/helicoptergame.js...

I think flappy bird went viral because of the difficulty.

[adam12]

Not frustrating?

[apitaru]

By making the collision predictable [edit: interestingly, larger than I would have imagined needed], the gamer knows exactly why he/she failed. There's 'honesty' in the directness that most games lack (and therefore gamers crave).

And then - by allowing a quick restart, any frustration is overshadowed with the desire to try again.

There are other interesting fine-details. For example, notice when the bird starts to dive (an experience game developer pointed it out to me). It happens when the bird goes under the last flap-point. This allows for a much deeper control system than the one-switch interaction suggests. This depth is intuitively grasped by the gamer on some level, providing more fuel to try again.