Flappy Dog - Postmortem

Believe it or not, this isn’t my first game. It is actually my second game. My first game was kind of a disaster, mostly because I was wayyyy over my head. I never used Godot and I never done any sort of pixel art, so it was kind of a terrible terrible idea.

You know when people say don’t make your first game your dream game? Yeah.

So I had to scope down and decided that I should go back to the basics which coincidentally fits with this 20 game challenge. I figured it would help me release at lease a finished product and help gain the confidence to make games I want to make in the future.

Which surprisingly did help me! Like a whole lot.

Even though it was a Flappy Bird clone, at the end of the day I learned something new! And that’s fine! It wasn’t perfect, but it works at least and it’s done

What I learned

• Viewport sizing vs window sizing 🪟
• Save states 💾
• A better understanding about game physics? ⚛️
• A better understanding of signals 🚦
• Parallax Background Scrolling 🏙️
• Applying sound effects 🎶
• A better understanding of UI in Godot 🎨

I think I also learned that FireFox does not play nice with HTML5 and defaults opening to new screen when running the game. Something something technical thing IDK about.

“But wait, what about player input, and animations, and scenes, and collision hitboxes”

Yeah I learned about that in my first game. However, even if the first game was kind of meh, I still learned a lot about using Godot. Also, how much work it is to create your own assets. I mostly sucked it up and used pre-existing sound effects because learning how to be a musician is sadly not in my toolkit as a “just for fun” kind of mood. Even though I do have the free trial version of FL studio. I simply refuse to buy it unless I can make an average sounding tune.

Timeline

I think this took me about two weekends to make. So 4 days I think? Unfortunately I'm not at the "Make Flappy Bird in 15 minutes", but maybe we'll see in six months? If I ever decide to keep doing this.