Gliding Bird

I like participating in Game Jams, and I like Linux, so when the Linux Game Jam 2022 came around, I wanted to participate. However, due to other commitments, I had a very limited amount of time to work on the project, so I knew I had to do something simple.

I decided to try and remake Flappy Bird, the old mobile game that the world became addicted to for a while. Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned...

One thing that I did to challenge myself was to not use an existing game engine, and instead build the game from scratch. As part of this, I had to implement collision, which I did using AABB, or Axis-Aligned Bounding Box. My implementation was simple, but it worked.

namespace FB
{
    bool checkCollision(int x1, int y1, int h1, int w1, int x2, int y2, int w2, int h2)
    {
        if (x1 < x2 + w2 &&
            x1 + w1 > x2 &&
            y1 < y2 + h2 &&
            y1 + h1 > y2)
            return true;

        return false;
    }

    bool checkPipeCollision(int birdX, int birdY, int pipeX, int pipeGap, int windowHeight)
    {
        return checkCollision(birdX, birdY, 16, 16, pipeX, 0, 32, pipeGap - 48) ||
               checkCollision(birdX, birdY, 16, 16, pipeX, pipeGap + 48, 32, windowHeight);
    }
} // namespace FB

One issue that I didn't really notice, was that I hadn't done the gravity calculations correctly, which has resulted in the bird not falling, but instead gliding. This is why I later changed the name to Gliding Bird, although most places still refer to the game's original name.

Overall, it was a fun experience, and it taught me how valuable time management can be during a jam. If you want to check out the game, it's linked down below.