Fishy Dive!

The Flappy Bird clone my brother Eric and I have been working on is finally released! Eric did all the art work on this game and I think it looks really good. As always, I'm very excited to be releasing something out on to Google Play. If you want to try it, you can pick it up here:

With the Flappy Bird clones I've seen (though I haven't spent much time sifting through or playing all those games) have kept to the same format. Your character is falling down, you have to tap to fly higher. I told myself that if I was going to do a Flappy Bird clone, I was at least going to try to make it a little different. Now, that is kind of hard in such a simple game. There's not much you can change up and still retain the same fun feel of game play. So, my simple change was to make the character float up to the top of the screen, and you have to tap to dive down a little. Its a very small change, obviously, but its a fun one and I think it makes the game just different enough to be worth at least checking out.

I also wanted to make the pillars you are avoiding something that actually made a little sense.  In Flappy Bird, the pillars you are trying to avoid hitting are just Super Mario style pipes. How does that make sense? The few other Flappy Clones (as I've come to call them) seem to stick with similarly out of place pillars. They are still things like stone pillars or sometimes just slightly different looking Mario pipes. Eric and I went with making our pillars be swarms of grinning jellyfish. Was this partially inspired by the jellyfish scene in Finding Nemo? Maybe, but it definitely makes sense to be avoiding them. When you end up hitting the jellyfish, a zap sound is played, a shock bubble appears around you, and your poor little fish floats to the top of the screen, upside down with an X over his eye (don't worry, he's just stunned. He'll be back).

Overall, I think the game is pretty fun for the coding time investment. It really didn't take that long. Maybe two days of on and off coding during one weekend to get the game play to a solid point, then it was just occasional aesthetic changes leading up to release. Most of all, it got me thinking of my simple "Flappy" style games to make, a few of which I have started working on and mentioned in previous blog posts.

Given the huge number of clones out there, in addition to the normal flooded market place of Google Play, my hopes aren't particularly high that this game gets a lot of visibility, but I'm happy to have worked with my brother on it, and I'm excited to be getting it out there.

Flappy Clones and the King of the Monsters

I've been continuing with my little "flappy clone" games. Our near ripoff of Flappy Bird (the fish one) is almost done. Eric just needs to finish one more image and Andrew is making us a few sounds. The Icarus game is pretty much done as well, and I'm really happy with it. I need to work in some animations, but gameplay-wise it is solid. I made one other game where you are a lizard running through the desert, dodging rocks and cacti, but I'm not a huge fan. It's for down in our queue for games to work on, so maybe I can think of an interesting tweak before we really get to it.

I've also started working on a new game, one that we will really start going on after the fish flappy bird clone, but before the Icarus game. It is a game based on Godzilla, so we want to get it out before May 16th, which is the release date of the new Godzilla movie (the trailers look awesome). Like the last two tappy style games I've made (Icarus and the lizard one), this game isn't a Flappy Bird clone, but is in the same spirit of the super simple single touch timing type gameplay. I've barely even gotten into it, and I'm already pretty excited about the potential with this one. I'm going to keep working on this one for the next week or so and push to get it out in early May. I'm hoping that the Fish game will be out sometime soon. Hopefully by this weekend so we can switch our focus entirely to the monster game. Here is a very early screenshot:

Simple Games

I've been continuing my work on Flappy Bird clone lately. It's actually done functionally and working pretty well. As fun and frustrating as the game it is based on. Eric is finishing up some graphics for it and we're going to be trying to get it up on Google Play soon.

We've also wanted to get some more original games out that are in the same type of demographic as Flappy Bird, that being the simple, fast, time-waster type games that are basically controlled with a single tap and are mostly about timing. I've started working on another little game in this area with a Greek Icarus theme.

I have an idea for yet another game after that. I like having some tiny side projects to be working on in addition to my larger, more time and effort intensive games. It's always a bit of a thrill for me to get a new game or app out on the market. Even when its something dumb and pointless like my Lucky Roulette Picker app.

Here are a couple screenshots from our Flappy Bird clone so far. Most of the art is Eric's original stuff, but the Jellyfish swarms that make up the obstacles in the game are recycled from our Deep Sea Trapper game until Eric finishes up his own Jellyfish. There are only a few art assets left and then we are good.

Artists and Clones

I've started looking for artists for my scrolling shooter. I've got a couple people who are interested and their art seems very good. I'm putting together a short gameplay video to let them see what kind of stuff they will be getting into. I feel like graphically this is a pretty big project and I want to make sure any artist working on it has a feel for what they're getting themselves into.

Additionally, with the whole Flappy Birds craze going on right now, my brother Eric convinced me to make a clone. It's a very simple game so it only takes a couple days to get going, but it was a fun little exercise and I could put my own little twist on the game. Now Eric is playing around with some graphic tools and he's going to try and make some graphics for the game. Its pretty fun, but the concept of the original and all the numerous clones are simple in general and it's hard to screw up. I like it, it was fun to play around with, and when my brother gets some graphics finished up we'll put it on Google Play and we'll see if anybody wants to take a look.