Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Flying Brick!

We had no plans to make any sort of Flappy Bird clone, until I read about the FlappyJam :)  80% was done sitting in a hospital waiting room, so it was a nice break and distraction from that.

Two main ideas for our variation.

1) First was to have something that doesn't fly well, so takes a LOT of tapping*.  A brick was the first thought.

2) And I had a crazy idea for monetization.  Let people pay to buy "Cheats" kinda like a point doubler in many games.  But taken to extremes.  $0.99 for a simple point doubler (2 points per tunnel), all the way up to $99 for a thousand points per tunnel.  

For awhile, it was $999 for the thousand pointer, but we decided that might be too crazy to start--but if people buy the $99 one, we'll add it in an update as a Million or Billion pointer!  Even in testing mode, with a test iTunes account that has no credit card, it gave me butterflies to click to buy that $999 one.

Spend $99 and you'll pretty much be guaranteed to set one of the top scores :)


News came out as it was in progress, that "Flappy" in the name was getting rejected.  So it is "Flying Brick" (Somebody else had squatted on Flappy Brick in iTunes anyway, so just as well we had to change it.)


All the graphics from WORLD 1-1 made it easy, Shawn drew a cute face to add to a simple red brick.  A couple days from start to finish :)


* One of the game testing/evaluating things my brother Pete thought of a year or two ago:  How many taps or actions you do in the first minute of gameplay.  It led to a couple games getting put on the back burner, since as action games, they didn't get to the action quick enough.

That's something that the original Flappy Bird nailed.

Flying Brick passes that test with flying colors too.  I counted 12 taps in about the first 2 seconds of gameplay, getting to the first obstacle.


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