Yesterday, Apple announced a new programming language called Swift for building iOS apps. Less than 24 hours later, someone has already used it to build a Flappy Bird clone.
If you aren’t familiar with Hello World, it’s basically what programmers traditionally use to demonstrate a programming language or test a basic system, since it’s a very simple thing to do. Testing a printer? Make it print the words Hello World.
Well, when you’re learning a new way to make games, you could use an equally simple project to get a feel for a new platform. We’ve already seen it done as a demonstration of how ‘easy‘ it is to make games in Unreal Engine 4. Now, Nate Murray jumped on the news of Apple’s new language and built Flappy Bird in Swift.
Maybe next time someone announces a new programming language, they will just start with Flappy Bird in the actual presentation?
h/t Carlo
Comments
8 responses to “Flappy Bird Is The New ‘Hello World’”
Despite my dislike of the whole Flappy Bird saga, it is actually a good basic game to test out a new language. You have a single touch input, you have one axis of movement, and a moving, repeating background and randomly generated obstacles. So you’re testing all the basic requirements for a game without requiring any significant effort. The only thing simpler in my opinion would be a “Tap when things line up” style game but then you wouldn’t get a moving background or randomly spawned objects.
I agree it’s a great test game, definitely more interesting than Breakout!
Stuff implementing Flappy Bird in ASM.. from what I remember “hello, world” was hard enough
A game that uses nintendo sprites, yet they get no credit for this copter clone.
You’re very late to the party. It’s been demonstrated that none of the assets are a direct rip-off of any Nintendo game’s graphics. Inspired by them? Definitely. Copy? No.
So if i were to write down a wiki word for word when i was back in school then it isnt copying?
and because i find this silly and post my opinion on it it makes me late to the party?
No reason to take this personally. Besides there’s a difference to copying word for word. Those sprites were no traced over and remade, they’re literally nothing like anything made by Nintendo, if you go down to the pixel. (They already tried pasting them on a transparent layer over a Cheep-cheep, the Nintendo character they resemble the most, and they’re actually quite different.) So yes, they heavily draw stylistic features from Nintendo graphics, which some may find reprehensible in itself, but technically they’re not a copy or a rip-off.
Even the backing is very similar.
its like a weird al song, it’s not a direct sample or lyrics but he still has to give the artist credit.