Those of you who didn’t get a chance to jump on the Flappy Bird bandwagon earlier this year, or those of you who were so obsessed that you issued a death threat to the developer Dong Nguyen when he pulled it from the app store can rest assured that you can get your fix with the new game, Tappy Chicken.
But what makes this game so different from the countless others that have surfaced in the Android Play Store or Apple App Store?
Tappy Chicken
Tappy Chicken is a free-to-play game (with in-game ads) offered in the Android Play Store and the Apple App Store and is essentially a clone of incredibly popular game Flappy Bird made by Gears of War developer Epic Games. The game is played by tapping your screen to make your chicken fly higher and avoid anything that might be in the flight path. If (read: when) you die, the chicken’s eyes turn to x’s and it lays a cracked egg.
However, what makes this game remarkable and different is that it was made by a single artist, Shane Caudle, who has no traditional programming skills.
It was made with the new Unreal Engine 4, “a professional suite of tools and technologies use for building high-quality games across a range of platforms” and shows how simple it is to create a game, even if you have no experience in game development.
Blueprint
Blueprint is a part of the Unreal Engine 4 and includes simplified scripting to make it accessible to those who are not familiar with it. For only $19 a month plus 5% gross revenue from any created product, anyone can have access to the software that includes multiple developmental levels. A more detailed description of the aspects can be found here, but this is just a quick summary.
Create Level Script
Each level has its own blueprint that can manipulate actors and cinematics. Here level streaming, check points, and other related factors can be created.
Create Interactive Objects
This is ideal for making interactive factors like doors and switches, but can also be expanded to collectible items and destructible scenery.
Create Customizable Prefabs
This aspect is useful for creating customizable props which can be time-consuming at first but will save time later on with continued use.
Create a Playable Game Character
Here any element for a playable character — such as camera behavior, mouse and controller input events, moving, jumping, swimming, and more — can be worked on.
Create a HUD
This can be used for any HUD variables from other blueprints and can also be used to display factors such as healths bars, score values, objective markers, and more.
Flappy Bird was designed to be a fun game to play when you have a few minutes of down time but became highly addictive — one of the main reasons for its deletion. Time will only tell if Tappy Chicken will be as popular and addictive.
But maybe we shouldn’t give up on Flappy Bird just yet as Nguyen said that a multiplayer and “less addictive” version of the game will be released sometime in August.
