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Making a Flappy Bird clone in Godot

Published: at 05:13 PM

I made a Flappy Bird clone using Godot engine (v4.2). Flappy Bird is game no. 1 in the 20 Games Challenge, where I will make 20 games as small projects to learn game development and design. In this chapter, I will share what I learned along the way about game development, game design, and about Godot game engine. I’m a beginner, so if you learn something by reading this, then you are learning with me. The source code is shared below and you can play the final game on itch.io

This is not a step-by-step tutorial on how to make flappy bird. You will find enough of them online, and you can always get all the source code from github.

Why make it?

Pre-requisite knowledge

The Plan

The planning stage is important for meeting the aforementioned goal of delivering the game under a time limit. Since I am able to work on this for an hour each weekday after my day job, I created smaller chunks or modules of tasks and assigned a time limit (in hours) to complete each task. I started getting more interesting ideas as I started building and believe me, you have to practice restraint to prioritize what to keep and what to exclude from the scope. I ended up including some enhancements, but only the ones that were low effort.

Flappy Bird - Plan

The original Flappy Bird was a 2013 mobile game that became a sleeper hit known for its simple yet addictive gameplay. It was made by Dong Nguyen, a Vietnamese solo developer who said that around 2014, the game was earning $50k a day through in-app advertisements.