Flippy Bard - Austin Ivansmith

[IvanDashSmith]

Hey everyone! Today I published "Flippy Bard", a game I had no intention to make until Dong Nguyen took down Flappy Bird, and used the opportunity to learn how to develop for Android and OUYA. I wrote about it here http://ivandashsmith.blogspot.com/20...ippy-bard.html

In summary, it is a game built on gameplay of Flappy Bird, but without ripping off the art of Mr. Nguyen's game, or other games.

While trying the game out on my OUYA, it felt like something was missing. Here was a console with 4 controllers, and I have a game you play by yourself, so why not do cooperative multiplayer? And then I thought "Well what if an OUYA owner only has 1 controller?" So I created "Multibard" mode, where each of the 4 bards is controlled by their corresponding color button, and at every 10th tower all knocked out players are respawned.



The gameplay is also tuned for the widescreen experience. While the smartphone and tablet versions are vertical and slower, the speed in the OUYA version is a lot faster, and there is no speed cap in multiplayer. So far my friends and I have had some pretty intense play sessions, and on one controller its the perfect party game for everyone to bunch around the controller, and it's even fun to play by yourself!

I hope you give Flippy Bard a try.

[DrunkPunk]

One of the more interesting (to me) clones. I'll have to check it out!

*waits for Hugo to come post his notorious pic*

[Ultramon]

... *waits for Hugo to come post his notorious pic*

LOL.. Shhhush! He may skip this one. (maybe).

[Dan Fu]

One of the more interesting (to me) clones. I'll have to check it out!

*waits for Hugo to come post his notorious pic*

At first I was kinda annoyed by Hugo's posts but in the last few weeks we've seen so many of these games I really get his point. At this point both Ouya and the Ouyaforum should have a section dedicate to this genre so people who can't get enough of it can find it all in one place while the rest of us can move on with our lives.

[Hugo]

One of the more interesting (to me) clones. I'll have to check it out!

*waits for Hugo to come post his notorious pic*

I don't post it anymore for a few reasons. For starters, it bumps the post for another game that I just wish would go away. Also, it really doesn't add anything to the conversation. Finally, I'm assured that practically everyone in the community knows what my stance is at this point, so I don't feel like it's necessary anymore.

At first I was kinda annoyed by Hugo's posts but in the last few weeks we've seen so many of these games I really get his point. At this point both Ouya and the Ouyaforum should have a section dedicate to this genre so people who can't get enough of it can find it all in one place while the rest of us can move on with our lives.

I jumped right on it immediately because I saw it coming and wanted to discourage people from continuing to create "games" in this "genre."


For the sake of staying specific to this thread, I believe that no matter what the differences are, any side-scrolling game where you tap a character through a gapped barrier on a single life for the sake of a high score is a Flappy Bird clone, so this is something that I won't be playing. I'm sure that you'll do fine though, as there seems to be as much love for these clones as there is hate.

According to Zedge, a popular personalization app that analyzes data from Google’s Play Store, there are a ton of Flappy Bird clones in existence. Since Feb. 24, Zedge reports at least 864 Flappy Bird clones are present on the Play Store, which is an absolutely staggering number. What’s also interesting is how many of these clones emerged after Nguyen announced his plans to pull Flappy Bird from the various app stores. Since his announcement on February 8, 729 of the 864 clones were launched on the store, 37 on the very day of his announcement! At its peak there were nearly 70 Flappy Bird clones being produced each day.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/...clones/#!zwfKN

[IvanDashSmith]

For the sake of staying specific to this thread, I believe that no matter what the differences are, any side-scrolling game where you tap a character through a gapped barrier on a single life for the sake of a high score is a Flappy Bird clone, so this is something that I won't be playing. I'm sure that you'll do fine though, as there seems to be as much love for these clones as there is hate.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/...clones/#!zwfKN

Fair enough. I won't argue that the gameplay isn't replicating the design of the original game, but it really did start out as a fun experiment, something I had some fun making along the way, and grew into a way for me to learn some OUYA devlopment. You might say I did the wrong things the right way.

It's pretty disgusting how many of these games are literally ripping art from other games and putting them in, not to mention just doing the layout and menus in an identical fashion over and over.

I don't expect to convince anyone to play this if they are sick of these games. Personally, I'm really looking forward to putting this game behind me now that I know what I know about OUYA and Android development. In the end I think the merit of having something you can play multiplayer in a party setting is what drove me to not abandon the project, and it's up there on the OUYA completely free to play, no ads, no tricks, and if you want to donate to me you can.

[DrunkPunk]

Speaking of art, did you create the bard in the background of the title pic? Very snazzy, that.

[IvanDashSmith]

Speaking of art, did you create the bard in the background of the title pic? Very snazzy, that.

No that was a friend of mine, Genzoman. http://genzoman.deviantart.com/ I've worked with him on some projects in the past so he made me this piece. I was going to use it as a promotional piece but then I thought it might be funny to have him looking down from the clouds in the main menu (Mufasa style) and it made me chuckle so I kept it.

[Rhellik]

It took a while, but I see now what you did with the name. ;D

[Blasteroid]

this game is really fun. the physics are great, the arc of the bard feels natural. i like the rpg-like element where you can level up your character skin. there are a lot of these clones showing up, this one is worth a download.