Month: February 2014

How to build a game like Flappy Bird with Xcode and SpriteKit

When I heard about Flappy Bird for the first time, the hype was already in its final phase: developer Dong Nguyen had decided to pull the app from the stores in “22 hours from now“. Apart from overreacting users and an allegedly daily advertising revenue of up to 50,000 US$, the simple game mechanics were something that caught my attention. The concept of clicking/tapping to keep the player on track wasn’t really an innovation in itself, but given the hype it caused, it was certainly worth a closer look. As a Sunday evening challenge, I tried to reproduce the game mechanics and ended up with less than 200 lines of code. Update Feb. 20th: I added the score counting part and included suggestions by readers Sascha and Nico. Updated code is pushed to GitHub. Update Feb. 27th: Fixed a small glitch in the tutorial that DylanYasen pointed out, thanks! (No code change.) Update Apr. 9th: Sorry, I currently don’t have time to update the tutorial. In the meantime, take a look what reader Daniel Bocksteger …