Thanks to Dong Nguyen, the world was introduced to Flappy Bird in 2013. This is a simple side scrolling game where the objective is to make your bird fly as far as possible without hitting any pipes. The longer your bird stays in the air, the higher your score gets. One direct contact with a pipe and GAME OVER.
This was one of the first truly viral mobile games – one that seemed to take over the world for a few months. It was so popular that it was making over $50,000 a day in advertising revenue just weeks after launch. This was an incredible J curve in popularity for an extremely simple game that had 1 control which was to tap the screen in order to keep the bird floating in the air in between pipes. The game became so wildly popular that Nguyen began receiving negativity from frustrated users that weren’t successful at scoring. Eventually he gave up and took down Flappy Bird from the App Store and Andriod. Even though the game is no longer available, the idea of it still lives on the internet.
I asked GPT-4 to help code up a basic version of this game with the following prompt:
write code for Flappy Bird where the user controls a yellow bird continuously flying between a series of vertical green pipes. the bird flaps every time you left click the mouse. if the bird hits a pipe, you lose and the game ends. This game goes on infinitely until you lose and you get points the further you go
After some trial and error, I created the following game and posted it on openprocessing.org, enjoy!
mike murphy 