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Flapping forward, hitting pipes along the way

02-02-2025

So its been about 10 days since I last wrote about the 20 games challenge. I've only been able to work on Flappy Birds sporadically since then, doing small bursts of development here and there. Here is a brief overview of what has been done so far:

I noticed an interesting behaviour in my self during these development sessions, where I found it quite easy to find motivation up until I had implemented the core game mechanics. Making the bird flap, the pipes move, score being counted, and collisions handled correctly was something I was motivated to sit down and do. But when I ended the development session on the 31st of January, I suddenly felt a slight dread to continue. I shrugged this off in the moment, but when I got up the next day I felt it even stronger. The game was in some respects finished, "only" missing all the correct art, sound, and menus.

Aka, most of the game in this case.

My impulses screamed that it would be a lot more fun to go on to the next game immediately at this point. Who cared if the menus, sound and art wasn't done? It wasn't like I was going to sell this game to anyone, so that stuff would just be "fluff" to the game.

But I refused, and while out on a quick drive to the nearby grocery store I had a little introspective moment where I dug into these feelings. Why was it always this way? The programming part of any development project is always the easiest for me to do, but all the other aspects of a game (or any software) I find myself shy away from. I'm no artist, and no sound engineer/musician, but I know I'm capable of producing something passable, at least for a small project like this. I'm not sure I have a concrete answer yet, but if I were to guess it has to do partially with stepping outside my comfort zone, producing a less than perfect result (weird that don't feel this about code), or simply the fear of doing things I find somewhat 'boring' in my personal time.

The stupid thing is that as soon as I start doing any of these non-code tasks, I usually find them a lot more engaging than I initially thought they would be. Sitting with Aseprite open and just doodling while listening to Spotify, or digging through sound bites and music for a fitting sound scape is actually quite enjoyable. And when the art, menus, and sound is in place, the game feels so much more alive than before. I had the same experience with creating Pong, where the moment I had some sound and music in the game I found myself starting it to test, but ending up just playing for fun for 3-4 minutes. So it has to be 'starting' the tasks that I dread. Being in a workflow is easy, but starting work and getting into a flow is hard.

So today I did exactly that. I fired up Aseprite and just threw a black line on the screen. No rime or reason to the line, but it was just to draw something as opposed to staring on a blank canvas. And it worked! The black line didn't remain for long, but it served as a kick in my mental behind to get on with drawing the art, and in not more than an hour I had some simple, but quite nice art for the bird, pipes, ground, sky, and the components of a parallaxing background. These were all very quick to add into the game, simply by adding some TextureRects in Godot, and suddenly the game felt 100 times more like a proper game. The final little thing I did today was building a custom shader to create the parallaxing background. And before anyone have time to think "Wow, custom shaders, sounds fancy", this is the shader program in question, and yes, I had to google how to do this: 

shader_type canvas_item;

uniform float scroll_speed;

void vertex() {
    UV.x += TIME * scroll_speed;
}

So I'm once again beating the drum about just starting and doing something, because once the inertia of moving have you traveling in a direction, there is no knowing how far you will go.