Flappy ... Sphere ?

I have written a separate simple game, this one called 'Flappy Sphere' (guess what it is based on ....) which includes particle effects and bitmap fonts.

This is complete and working, but I want to add an FSM library and associated Scene manager, and Flappy will become a host of that (at the moment it is a 'one scene' game, so to speak.

Flappy Sphere is about 250 lines of code (including comments), but that's with external libraries for the particle system and bitmap font.

There's not much to it really - pipes, 'bird', score, 'get ready' text and a background that pass a few messages about - so for example, the background sends a message to the bird when it is tapped.

The neat thing about this is it is trivially easy to add more birds (spheres ?) just at will, just by creating them, bit like in the 'Pong' demo. Or pipes, want 25 pipes on the screen, dead easy. You can even have more than one score and it will work (because the score is implemented by messaging)

The only code that is actually specific to multiple 'birds' is when a collision is detected and a bird blown up, it checks to see if there any bird objects in the game before ending it.

So you could add another bird just with:

Bird:new({ gravity = 100, x = 100 })

and it will just work.  Flappy Bird with several birds is really hard :) Changing the gravity for different birds is even harder.

Some things are more optical. When you move a sphere it doesn't use messaging to query for collisions, it gets a list of 'obstacle' tagged objects and asks each of them if it's hit them by calling it's 'has collided' method. It's a trade off between decoupling and efficiency. Isn' t everything ? :)