Spikey Bird: Creating a Flappy Bird Mod in the Wolfram Language
An earlier version of this post appeared on Wolfram Community, where the creation of a game interface earned the author a staff pick from the forum moderators. Be sure to head over to Wolfram Community and check out other innovative uses of the Wolfram Language!
If you like video games and you're interested in designing them, you should know that the Wolfram Language is great at making dynamic interfaces. I've taken a simple game, reproduced it and modded it with ease. Yes, it's true—interactive games are yet another avenue for creative people to use the versatile Wolfram Language to fulfill their electronic visions.
The game I'm using for this demonstration is Flappy Bird, a well-known mobile game with a simple yet captivating interactive element that has helped many people kill a lot of time. The goal of the game is to navigate a series of pipes, where each successful pass adds a point to your score. The challenge is that the character, the bird, is not so easy to control. Gravity is constantly pulling it down. You "flap" to boost yourself upward by repeatedly tapping the screen, but you must accurately time your flaps to navigate the narrow gaps between pipes.
So follow along and see what kind of graphical gaming mayhem is possible in just a few short lines of code!