Flappy Bird’s company dotGears recently notified Apple that my game Duck Run infringes on their copyrights, specifically the bird character used in the game. I spent hours drawing my duck character in photoshop and I think it looks nothing like Flappy Bird.  What do you think?

The above Flappy Bird image was pulled from the USPTO FlappyBird trademark application.   This application was recently filed by Dong Nguyen in March, 2014 and is waiting for review.  He is not just filing this under electronic games but also watches, stationary, hand-bags, glassware, blankets, pillows, clothes, and toys.  Not only is Flappy Bird coming back to the App Store, but it appears dotGear is taking the Angry Birds approach and will start selling merchandise.  And why not?

We all know the story of Flappy Bird and how it quickly became a huge success only to be removed from the App Store because the author couldn’t handle the stress. I covered this story on my Tech 411 podcast and even had a chance to meet the author, Dong Nguyen while at GDC this year.

I was actually really excited to meet him, as the Flappy Bird story was really big at the time.  I only asked him one question, “Are you bringing Flappy bird back?”  “Yes” he replied.  We were both at Twitter HQ so it seemed appropriate that I should tweet the news.  The next thing I knew, Mac Rumors was running the story.

Is Flappy Bird Original?

We are all influenced by the work of others.  I recommend watching Everything is a Remix to really see this point illustrated.    The artwork and gameplay from Flappy Bird is far from being original.  Let’s compare it to Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers:

Flappy Bird, on the left, has almost identical green pipes found in the Super Mario Brothers game.   The Flappy Bird gameplay is very similar to the secret underwater world found in the same game.  Mario is controlled by tapping a button that flaps his arms causing him to move upward, while not flapping causes Mario to fall downward.  The Flappy Bird graphic itself looks more like the fish from this same underwater level than my little ‘ol duck.

Why Build Duck Run?

Dong said that it took him 3 days to create Flappy Bird. I was impressed he was able to make a side-scrolling game in just 3 days.  I wondered if I could create a flappy style game in the same amount of time. Considering I’ve competed in plenty of hackathons and even wrote a game in just 20 lines of code (which became the starting point of my book), I thought this would be a fun challenge to take on.  After just 3 days, I had completed my game which I called Duck Run and released it to both the Android and iOS platforms.

Duck Run received great reviews and has pulled in around 200k free downloads.  Because it was so simple, it became my go-to game for learning how to port to other platforms. It’s now available on the Mac platform and Amazon Fire TV.  I think it’s smart to have a simple game in your portfolio for this reason alone.

Decision Time

The last thing my company needs is another frivolous lawsuit, but I refuse to be bullied into removing Duck Run from the App Store.   I think it’s pretty clear it does not violate any trademarks or copyrights.  I’m not sure the original Flappy Bird game could say the same thing.

I just released COMPULSIVE for iOS and Android.  It’s a puzzle game.  The rules are pretty simple in that all you have to do is join 4 or more tiles of the same color to score points.  The bigger groups you clear the more points you get.  And you earn a bonus multiplier if you can create chain reactions–one group clears which causes another to clear.  The game last 60 seconds which is plenty of time to score lots of points.

Drag tiles anywhere on the board.

The first thing I noticed when people play Compulsive is they don’t realize tiles can move to any location on the board.  This is most likely because they are use to playing Bejeweled or Candy Crush.  This will only hurt your chances of scoring big because Compulsive lets you move tiles clear across the screen to make a move.  It only requires that there be a same color tile next to where you drop it.  That’s it.  I found after experimenting with a lot of different rule sets, that having more restrictions on tile movement just wasn’t as fun.  I never got into  Bejeweled for probably this very reason.

Clear an entire color off the board.

There is a special glowing tile that drops on the board every 15 seconds or so.  It’s the coolest part of the game in that it cleans off all tiles of a specific color from the board.  Just drag it onto the color you want to clear and then watch them explode. The glowing tile is very strategic.  It can be used to quickly clear a color that’s in the way, score some points, and setup an awesome combo.  The glowing tile also clears itself if it hits the bottom row.  It’ll reward you with 1,000 points when that happens which also counts towards a combo multiplier.  Figuring out the best way to use this tile will take a little practice but the rewards can be great.

Where did I come up with the idea?  I think I had a lot of influences from a lot of different games.  The board is a vertical 6×8 rectangle with tiles that fall down the screen.  This  might remind you of Tetris.  It has a very generous point system which might feel a little bit like Bejeweled. The design is very modern and clean which is similar to Letterpress.  The glowing tile is similar in behavior to that of the diamond in Super Puzzle Fighter II.  The Mike O’Meara show thinks the music comes from the movie American Psycho.  I really don’t think that’s the case… although it was one of my favorite movies of all time.

Please try it out and let me know what you think!

My latest purchase from Apple is the 27″ Thunderbolt Display and it has inspired me to write this article. It’s the most beautiful piece of crap I’ve ever purchased. And by that I mean, the display is beautiful but the audio is total crap. In this video, I’m playing a simple tone of a constant frequency so you can hear all the lovely artifacts:

If I wanted snap, crackle, and pop then I’d spend a buck on some rice krispies but this is completely unacceptable for a $1,000 computer monitor. How could Apple who is known for revolutionizing the way we purchase music, release a product that can’t even play audio without distortion? I’ve determined that it happens if you plug anything into the USB ports on the monitor. I’ve joined this rather large thread of unhappy customers. Thankfully I’m still within 14 days of receiving this purchase so it’s getting returned to my local retail store. I’m hoping the next Thunderbolt display either fixes the problem or they just remove the speakers altogether and make the price cheaper.

I also picked up a couple Mac Minis this year. I needed a new workstation as my iMac was getting slow when trying to compile apps using the latest Xcode. I came really close to dropping $3,000 on the 15″ Retina MacBook Pro but I kept reading about lagging and ghosting issues. No thanks I’ll wait for v2. So instead, I bought a high-end Mac Mini with fusion drive and 16 GB of RAM. This seems to be a better option than buying a Mac Pro desktop. Apple just doesn’t seem to care about the Mac Pro. It hasn’t had a real update in a long time and it still doesn’t support Thunderbolt. Maybe next year the Mac Pro will get a real update but for now the only desktops Apple cares about is iMac and Mac Mini. I’m sure there are plenty of Xcode and Final Cut Pro folks like myself that still appreciate the power of desktop computers.

The other Mac Mini I purchased was to replace my OTA DVR which runs Windows 7 Media Center. The small footprint and quietness of the Mac Mini makes it a great HTPC DVR but I’ve noticed it has been skipping with HD video playback. I can’t confirm it’s the Intel HD 4000 chipset but that would seem the likely suspect given my last HTPC never skipped video and had a slower processor. I hope the future Mac Mini’s include a higher-end graphics card.

The iPhone 5 was another purchase and overall it’s really fast compared to my previous iPhone 4. Apple’s A6 processor combined with Verizon LTE makes it the fastest phone I’ve ever owned. But if I was going to get picky, and I am, I really wish they would have made the screen even bigger. I know the design is made so you can easily touch any part of the device with one hand. But not all hands are the same size so why not give guys like me an XL model? Apple needs to start competing with the bigger Android devices that are making me want to switch from iOS–This includes the Samsung Galaxy S III w/ 720P display and Verizon DNA with 1080P display. But my biggest complaint is that the iPhone has never been able to go a full day on a single charge. Instead of making it thinner, can we please just add a bigger battery? Maybe this will be the big feature of iPhone 6.

I also picked up an iPad 4 to replace my iPad 2. The Retina display looks amazing. But there is something I like better when holding the iPad 2. It’s thinner and lighter. Maybe the iPad 5 will get it right.

So there you have it–Major issues with Thunderbolt and Mac Book Pro with Retina display combined with annoyances of the Mac Mini, iPad 4, and iPhone 5. I’m hoping next years revisions get it right.

Check out my latest article on driving app downloads over at TechRepublic.

I recently presented “App Strategies: Secrets of Mobile Marketing and App Design Across Platform” at the MoDevEast conference. It includes a lot of marketing and design tips for developers. Hopefully you’ll find a few gems in there to help drive downloads for your app.

My favorite programming language is C++.  My favorite game library is Cocos2d.  It’s too bad that Cocos2d is written in Objective-C and only supports iOS and Mac.  And by that I mean it’s too bad I didn’t discover the C++ port of Cocos2d called Cocos2d-X earlier.  It’s absolutely amazing.  Why?

• First, it’s C++.  My favorite.  The standard template library with it’s generic containers such as std::map is the best.
• Second, it uses all the same class names and constructs as my favorite Cocos2d gaming library.  This made it extremely easy to switch over to.
• Third, it’s cross-platform and runs almost everywhere–iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.  It even has a HTML5 port and the Windows port uses DirectX instead of OpenGL.

With this kind of distribution and support why would you code up your own solution or limit yourself to a single platform?  I’m all in and you should be too.  That is of course if you write games.  Check out my first Cocos2d-x game called Tic Tac Toe Glow which I’m releasing to iOS and Android at the same time.  Windows 8 and Mac will be coming too and why not?  This library makes it easy to do.