Maverick Bird may just have been a fun riff on this week’s gaming meme for Cavanagh, but its release comes amid growing numbers of developers suggesting that far from being a rubbish, ad-supported game cloning Super Mario’s pipes, Flappy Bird was actually pretty good.
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In the wake of this removal, a host of mobile clones and free web games have sprung up to give people who didn’t manage to download the original game their Flappy Bird fix. “I cannot take this anymore,” he tweeted on Saturday, a few days after claiming that the game’s success “ruins my simple life. Nguyen removed Flappy Birds from Apple and Google’s app stores at the weekend, after complaining about the pressure caused by its global success. I’m stuck on five points after about 30 or 40 goes, and never want to clap eyes on it again. Is Maverick Bird a gentle introduction to the flappy-object microgenre? Well, obviously not: it’s punishingly hard. It switches the original’s bird and pipes for a square and jagged-edged walls, along with a pulsating theme tune from electronica artist Kozilek.
#SUPER HEXAGON DEVELOPER MOVIE#
Would you option the movie rights to Super Hexagon if the right buyer came along? What if it was with a director you really hated, but they offered you way too much money?Sure, why not.Cavanagh has launched a free web game called Maverick Bird, describing it as a “Flappy Bird fan game”. Why doesn't every game let you restart immediately after a failure?I don't think any approach to game design works in all cases or is universally true - some games have very good reasons for not restarting instantly! Some games don't, though, you're right. I guess that's not really how I think about games. I don't think this has changed anything about how I might approach games in the future. At the time I believed this would limit the game to a very niche audience, especially on iPhone, and I was ok with that - I'm very happy to have been wrong. It was really important to me that Super Hexagon was as difficult as it is, because mastering that is kinda what the game's all about. Has this changed the way your next games will be?Yeah, it was! Success is always a surprise, at least for me. You've said more than once that Super Hexagon's success was a surprise. How do you define an "indie" game developer?I don't care. So many awesome games are finalists this year, I honestly don't know where to start or stop. I played an earlier version of Samurai Gunn at Fantastic Arcade in September, I love it too. Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any standouts?Yeah, quite a few of them! I started playing Starseed Pilgrim last month when Bennett Foddy was talking about it on Twitter, I love it. From there, it took around six months to complete in total. How long have you been working on the game?I started Super Hexagon a few months after the Pirate Kart. I kinda see Super Hexagon as the culmination of a particular strand of action games I generally make at jams - specifically, as simplifications of things I've made like Self Destruct or the Super Gravitron from VVVVVV. I ended up making a game called Hexagon, which is basically the game that Super Hexagon grew from.
Where did the concept come from?It started out as a jam game I made for the GDC Pirate Kart last year - I'd made small action/shooter games for jams like this before, and for this one I set out to try to make something less cluttered and noisy than things I'd made in the past. What game development tools are you using?At the moment, C++ and a library called openFrameworks. We don't work together usually, we're not a company.
Jenn's a videogame journalist, Chipzel is a musician, and I make games. What is your team's game development background, if any?Well, the team is just me (made the game), Chipzel (wrote the music) and Jenn (did the voice acting). Today we speak to Terry Cavanagh, whose Super Hexagon is nominated for the Excellence in Design award this year. As part of our Road to the IGF series, Gamasutra is speaking to each of the finalists in the 2013 Independent Games Festival to find out the story behind the games.