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Show HN: Flappy Bird and Wordle
Hey HN!
FlappyBirdle combines elements from the game Flappy Bird and the popular word game Wordle. I wanted to see if I could make a game that added urgency to Wordle, while also feeling outragous at the same time. I think I achieved it with FlappyBirdle. Every time you type a letter of the word, the bird flaps its wings and you get closer to the goal. It also has an easy mode that ignores the pipes, so even beginners can get a good score. Let me know if you have any ideas on how I can make it better!
- Thurys 4y agoThis is a really great idea, but unfortunately not usable on mobile, even though the site is responsive.
- methodical 4y agoTwo QoL things I noticed within 1 minute of playing: please add backspace and start registering key presses as soon as someone starts typing! Having the text "type to start", and then my initial keypress being lost into the void was really frustrating, especially when there isn't any backspace.
- Georgelemental 4y agoThat would eliminate the urgency… you could type a letter and then backspace indefinitely
- TheCoreh 4y agoMaybe limit it to once per word?
- xypage 4y agoYou could make it so you only get a flap the first time you write a letter for a given spot, so you could write and backspace for the flap but now you need two letters for the next one since when you "refill" that spot it won't flap for successive entries.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoThe backspace could “eat” the next character
- movedx 4y agoYou just... die instantly unless you get the very first letter right? Huh?
- swyx 4y agoplay the game, youre not even trying to play before criticising it
- movedx 4y agoObviously I did, hence knowing you "died" if you got the first letter wrong. Cool your beans. Relax.
- hk__2 4y agoYou have six tries to get the first letter (and the rest of the word) right.
- jeanmayer 4y agoIn easy mode, you don't die after 6 tries, but the word is updated
- yreg 4y agoThere's no way I'm ever going to win a round of this.
- gardenhedge 4y agoYou can just type a a a a a, then b b b b b etc to find all the letters
- jeanmayer 4y agoYou can do that, but even in easy mode, the word changes after 6 tries ;)
- johnla 4y agoEven with easy mode, this is way impossible. I like the idea but it's way too hard. Maybe turn it into a typing game where you simply keep the bird from falling into the ground.
- bskcx 4y agoThis is awesome (and very stressful)! I got some words, but in a pretty cheesy way; just typing nonsense until I found letters, then typing that letter 5 times to see where it was in the word. I wish there some more satisfying feedback when you get a word right
- jeanmayer 4y agoFor now, you get +20 points. Do you have any idea of a more satisfying reward?
- swyx 4y agoi need an option for like 0.25x speed, my brain clock speed is not fast enough to play this game
- jeanmayer 4y agoBelieve it or not, I actually widened the gap in the pipes, and reduced the gravity based on the original. Try switching to easy mode, it removes collisions with the pipes.
- riffraff 4y agoIf the tubes don't kill you like they did in flappy bird, but they confuse you, I'd remove them altogether. Otherwise, fun but way too hard.
- jeanmayer 4y agoMakes sense! I will remove the pipes on easy mode. Thanks for the feedback
- sublinear 4y agoI didn't know I could think up so many vulgar 5 letter words under this much pressure
- jeanmayer 4y agohahaha this game was made to get you out of the comfort zone
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 4y agoI’ve never felt so anxious and unhappy when playing a game. In a horrible way I love this so much. It’s like Chessboxing if you were to play both simultaneously. There’s such a mismatch between what you need from your brain with this.
- xnx 4y agoChessboxing is exactly where my mind went!
- jeanmayer 4y agoAfter playing for a few months (like I have) it becomes a bit more familiar, but there’s almost a complete mental freeze the first couple of times around.
- user3939382 4y ago> anxious and unhappy when playing a game That's basically Starcraft for me, which I guess is why I stopped playing it.
- ermir 4y agoThat's exactly what it was like for me when SC2 came out and I started playing the ladder, after a few weeks I got used to it. I then saw it again when I got my roommate to start playing, and I could feel his anxiety. I figured out that the main cause was the fog of war, people unused to scouting and extrapolating possible enemy forces are very prone to freaking out and turtling up, which will lose the game almost always.
- echelon 4y ago> I’ve never felt so anxious and unhappy when playing a game. This should become a new genre of game, with the level of discomfort the optimization criteria. There should exist games that make you feel bad as you play them, yet somehow still compel the player to continue. It would be an art form.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
- alienlid 4y agoEveryone in this thread is a bunch of pansies. Great job
- Humphrey 4y agoAfter about 3 screens (like 18 guesses), I almost had it but then the word changed on me, and so I died.
- lofatdairy 4y agoThis happened to me too, and I probably spent way too long trying to recreate it. Truth be told, nothing in the code really looks like it would cause this issue. My best guess is that when the game is in the ready state, for some reason getWordOfDay() is called every frame, and maybe switching tabs causes some desynchronization. Also I think the game defaults to easy mode when you open it for the first time, but the switch does not indicate this properly. I think it's bc line 72 isn't supposed to make the equality check to "true", since it can only ever take bool values anyways.
- jonny_eh 4y agoYou can fly over the pipes by going off-screen. If you type fast enough you don't have to worry about collisions :)
- jeanmayer 4y agoyeah, but you lose the game if you don't get the word right with easy mode OFF. Thanks for the feedback :D
- jtolmar 4y agoI got to 327, but then suddenly lost without seeing why. That was horrible, thanks!
- twodave 4y agoReduce gravity and slow down time about 2x each and I think this would actually be entertaining. The way it is now I can’t even type the correct letters without bombing
- budoso 4y agoOne trick is you don't have to use correct words. So once you find a yellow letter you can just repeat it for the next word to get it's location in the word, like 'AAAAA'. Try this for a few attempts and you'll get it (assuming you've played flappy bird a little already)
- ismokedoinks 4y agoI won on hard mode once! That's my achievement for the day. Great job.
- jeanmayer 4y agowow, congrats! You could do this once a day to keep your brain active (or get a migraine)
- eldenring 4y agoIts a bit too easy with the mistakes being accepted. You can just finish a word randomly if you're worried about dying. Can you add a way to only accept correct words? maybe dying if the word is not real.
- jeanmayer 4y agowell, so you want the impossible mode hahah, I can add for those who really like challenges
- saurik 4y agoWithout that, it is just way too easy though, as you can type stuff like "aeiou" and optimize for the highest scoring letter combos. Like you don't really have to bother trying to play the wordle part with much of your brain at all, as what makes that game difficult was elided. Maybe instead of dying the word just clears and doesn't count (which means you have to play flappy bird for longer while you re-do the word). I think if that were the mechanic I would find it fun enough to play a lot.
- alanbernstein 4y agoThat isn't going to get you to the wordle solution as quickly as you would by actually guessing based on the revealed information though, right?
- saurik 4y agoI am sorry but I don't quite get your point, which might mean you didn't understand mine. FWIW, I'm the kind of person who was excited by Wordle only until it got boring and all of my friends started playing Octordle as that's the only place we started to feel any challenge ;P. There are two problems: the first is that you absolutely can beat this game way faster than Wordle as it relaxes a key limitation of Wordle. Let's say you play "ETRAO" as your first word. Already that's easy easier than Wordle, as you can just type stuff for that first word and gain way more information than otherwise you should be able to. (Now, that isn't the best distribution for five letters but like, the point is whatever that is is now just a collection of random letters. Someone figured out the best five letter real word starting word, but I have since forgotten it as it has been a long time since I cared; however, whatever it was, if you don't need to actually have it be a word you can do way better, as you can also scramble the order of the word to put the letters in the best positions to learn the most, and this all happens before you start playing the game.) Now for some later word let's say you really just want to know if A goes somewhere... with Wordle you have to guess an actual word, which means you have to 1) figure out a word that matches the constraints you are trying to optimize and 2) doesn't waste much of your guess by reusing stuff you already know. In actual Wordle that's essentially most of the challenge: "is there a word I can come up with that simultaneously checks on that A but also uses this Z and this Q I have left over, preferably without using U because I have nothing to learn from U anymore?" It stresses your vocabulary in addition to stressing your logic ability. In this game you just type the Z and the Q and move on with your life as vocabulary only matters for a real guess. The other problem with this relaxed ruleset is it kind of undermines the real challenge of having to simultaneously play Flappy Bird: you are sitting there in a panic trying to figure out a word you can play and... you know? screw it: just relax and play that Q you think might be relevant and don't waste your brain power coming up with a word right now as you don't need a word.
- binarymax 4y agoIt’s crazy and I love it.
- jwm20 4y agoLove this concept! Game mechanics work we'll, but I'd need a color blind mode to ever have even a chance of winning.
- jeanmayer 4y agohmmm maybe a high contrast mode would solve?
- bil7 4y agoyou can just spam the keyboard to stay afloat, memorizing green letters until you crack the word.
- wheelie_boy 4y agoI'd love a separate easy mode / hard mode top score
- jeanmayer 4y agoI'm working on adding the ranking :D Thanks for the feedback
- fwungy 4y agoIt would be cool to have a timer and a single word mode so you could play it competitively with someone.
- jeanmayer 4y agoMaybe in the next update I can add a ranking and the single word mode. Thanks for the feedback :D
- d--b 4y agoThis doesn’t display nicely on iphone 12 mini :-/
- psyklic 4y agoGreat game! It could help to initially show a sample word along with a beat/pulse to show the user they can enter the letters "slowly".
- fwungy 4y agoWould also be cool to have a record of how many words you solved.
- chungy 4y agoNo collision on the pipes makes it trivially easy to just keep pressing the same letter to stay alive. Don't need to care about wordle progress, and hardly even on the flappy bird part.
- tjbiddle 4y agoAmazing, but I'm only going to last like 2 games before stopping from frustration, lol. Add an option where I can 'cheat' by typing a letter and still using backspace :-) That way it keeps the fingers moving, but allows me to think. In addition, I often type an 'X' as a placeholder in normal wordle so I can let my brain map out the word.
- Zachsa999 4y agoYou need to be stopped
- jeanmayer 4y agohahaha why? :(
- etothet 4y agoVery clever. Thank you for making this!
- bagels 4y agoI just kept pressing H rapidly and this leads to a seemingly infinite score. There is no way to actually type fast enough on mobile to legitimately play this.
- Thurys 4y agoYeah this works lol
- charcircuit 4y agoskill issue I was able to solve a wordle on mobile.
- fwungy 4y agoThis is like doing n-grams.
- omoikane 4y agoReminds me of this other game that my friend made, which combines 2048 and flappy bird: https://2048birds.ravenblack.net/ https://2048birds.ravenblack.net/ The description says "A game combining Flappy Birds and 2048 in the most horrible way". I don't think it's meant to be fun.
- jeanmayer 4y agothat's fun lol, easier than flappy birdle I think
- johndhi 4y agoCongrats, if drives me crazy.
- jeanmayer 4y agolol thanks, I guess
- quickthrower2 4y agoNo hit detection?
- jeanmayer 4y agoif you are on easy mode, there's no pipe collision. If you disable easy mode, if you hit the pipes, you lose.
- evad3r 4y agoWhen it loads, it seems to show easy mode is disabled, you have to toggle it on and then off again to actually enable hard mode. I was also able to keep looping through six guesses over and over until it showed me the five green letters, I managed to "crack" the word as SKIMP, however apparently the word was SMIRK in the end? not sure what happened there.
- jeanmayer 4y agohmmm might have some error with local storage. I'm saving that config (easy mode) on local storage. thanks for the feedback :D
- trykondev 4y agoThis was incredibly fun -- my wife and I played as a team where I am the flappy bird and she calls out ideas for the Wordle part. Highlight of our day!
- jeanmayer 4y agoIt warms my heart, thanks for sharing ;)
- fatih-erikli 4y agoThis game is originally a supermario. It jumps when you take an action. Not flies contrary to the title impose.
- ivankuz 4y agoThat's awesome! I did something similar a while ago, but instead of Flappy Bird I merged wordle with Snake https://ivan.engineering/projects/snordle/ https://ivan.engineering/projects/snordle/
- Zecc 4y agoI got extremely lucky on my first try as the letters were well-positioned, so I got it right after three guesses. And the answer was AWARD. I did not have such luck on my second attempt, which left me SURLY. I liked it.
- Sarkie 4y agoYour hit detection is wrong fyi. Just spam letters to go above the pipes until you find the right letter and move on. AAAAAAA BBBBBBB CCCCCCC etc. Fun idea though!
- raydiatian 4y agoThe chasm between can and should
- thom 4y agoQuite the work of memetic necromancy this.
- fancybucket 4y agoApparently, the speed of the game depends on your monitor's refresh rate. When I tried playing on my 165 Hz main monitor, I could barely type two words without dying. But when I moved the window over to my 60 Hz monitor, it was very playable.
- afrcnc 4y agoThis is the most horrible game ever. Worse than Warzone 2
- dnadler 4y agoGood god. This is absurd. Congrats!
- steakscience 4y agoANXIETY