Hi, folks!

Well it finally happened! After years of telling myself that I’d learn to use a modern, commercial game engine “eventually” I finally buckled down, found a great Unity beginner’s tutorial which inspired me to keep going after completion!

Anywho, without further ado, I’ll leave you to give the game a spin and perhaps even get enough entertainment out of it to beat my high score (55 as of writing)!

Objective

Fly between as many pairs of pipes as you can without hitting any!

Controls

  • Click the left mouse button or press the spacebar (desktop) or tap the screen (mobile) to flap your wings and briefly ascend!
  • Click anywhere outside the game widget to pause the game and then click anywhere back on the widget to resume (just beware that the resume click will still register as a “flap” so be careful!).



This was a huge step for me because in the past I’d always inevitably abandon such endeavors before almost immediately going right back to writing everything from scratch (an admittedly laborious, yet comfortably familiar feat). I naturally find the frustration that comes with navigating a complicated UI to be particularly exhausting (which was undoubtedly a contributing factor to the reality that it took me 7 years, as well as an actual job in software development, to finally make the switch from BlueJ to IntelliJ as my daily driver Java IDE). In addition to the brilliant tutorial from GMTK I also found that the process of familiarizing myself with the Unity editor’s UI was exponentially more intuitive this time around given my recent attempt at implementing a Unity-like, composition-based Entity-component system in one of my homebrew game engine projects! Suddenly, it made sense to me just “why” we were “wiring” things up the way we were in the editor and before too long I was able to intuit just “what” to plug in “where” as well as which objects need to communicate with one another in general. Maybe I’ll end up writing a blog post about my entity-component system and composition pattern insights!

I plan to keep developing simple clones and custom copy-cats of popular, minimalist games until I get comfortable enough with Unity to start working on my own original ideas! So, feel free to give me a follow on itch.io!

Thanks for stopping by!