Touchscreen Tuesday #3 (Double Feature)
...and now its time for "Touchscreen Tuesday", where I post WIP screenshots of games for cruddy touchscreen devices that will never amount to anything (well, for my favorite genre of gaming anyway)... Oh, and for Android and 3DS (the latter of which I will likely never get a dev kit for...). I apologize for the lack of updates recently (not that too many people honestly cared), but you know, real life things. To make up for this, I think I'll do a double feature (leave it to me to start another side project BEFORE my first side project isn't even 5% finished). I've noticed that there's a new #1 top free app on the android market at time of writing, and if you do any sort of Android gaming (which, since I wish to develop for the platform, I kind of have to...), you probably have heard of it.
Flappy Bird. Oh God Flappy Bird... This pretty much just proves how little quality control the app store has. Ignoring the fact that the "bird" looks like a fin-less Cheep Cheep, that the pipes look to be literally looks like its ripped straight out of Super Mario All Stars (Android apps just love that games graphics for some reason), and I swear I've seen that BG and tileset before (probably on Open Game Art, but since the site pretty much exists to give graphics away, I going to ignore this. But seriously, if there's any programmers reading this post, you can't go wrong with Open Game Art, just avoid that GPL like the plague. Well, now that the shameless plug is out of the way...), notice the filesize. 894 kilobytes. Well, you may be thinking, "Gee, they must be masters of data compression!" Well, no. The reason that the game is that size is that there is literally ONE obstacle in the entire game. That would be the aforementioned SMAS pipe. I must say, thats, actually quite a shame. I mean sure, the game plays like crap, but the fact that pretty much everyone I know is talking about the darn thing means that they've got an incredible social aspect going here. I mean, make the game play a little bit better (though the controls might be intentionally the way they are, I don't really care for them, as it makes it a little TOO chalenging to dodge things after a while), and add more content to it, and maybe it will be deserving of its number 1 spot. Yes, I'm serious. I also looked at another app, which ripped it off called Clumsy Bird Well, it looks like Clumsy Bird is a step up. Well...strong imphasis on A step up. The graphics are better (and not stolen to boot), but the physics/controls are still as wonky IMHO, which furthers my belief its intentional. While there is also added content, it amounts to "Oh, you can pay money to keep playing this run!". Thats...not what I had in mind at ALL. Call me old fashioned, but the way F2P games are when it comes to these apps kind of makes me sick. I could go on for hours, but I think I'll just sum it up in a couple of sentences. When it comes to these types of games, you're better off just putting in coins or an equivalent item, making all purchasable items except for removing ads (which should be non-intrusive BTW) purchasible with said item, and then making profits off of ad revenue. If you don't like putting ads in your game, take a nice hard look at the way TF2 does things. So yeah, Clumsy Bird doesn't cut it either. If it isn't obvious at this point, I started working on my own clone last Saturday night. It...um...didn't really go so well. How so? Well, to be honest if you played it and Flappy Birds right after the other, the only similarity you'd see is birds...(curse me and my inability to keep things the exact same). Here's the tragedy: Well, ignoring the placeholder art, I've taken the source from my infinite runner game I've shown earlier, and been working on the following for the last few days:
Random Level Generation - The "infinite" runner I was showing earlier actually used set level layouts, it was to be more like a platformer that you hold down the run button for...
Multiple Environments System - Not only is the game set up to support multiple environments, but each environment can have its own graphics and level generation.
Multiple Costume System - Sick of a generic bird? Well if I actually finish this game, you can pick a different generic bird!
Better (In my opinion) Physics - As opposed to tapping the screen repeatedly, you can just slide around on the screen to move up and down. Obiously this will be compensated for by tougher to dodge obstacles (but don't worry, I'll try not to be unfair...)
Well, once I add dying and the shop mechanics, etc. All I'll need to add is content. Hopefully before all this Flappy Wing craze is over, you'll be able to find my "clone" in the appstore (I'm still bad at this app creation thing...), and likely as my "Janurary" 1GAM game.
Oh, and for those of you who care about my infinite runner, I've made bits and pieces of progress whilst i've been gone, mostly coins and different kinds of enemies. Though its been all programming and no art, so YAY! BLUE SQUARES! Due to both this game being the same genre, I'll more that likely be able to just steal the infinite level generator/store code from my other side project. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like now:
