Not another Flappy Bird clone!

The removal of Flappy Bird, from the mobile stores, is probably one of the strangest events in gaming history. It occurred during the game's peak, Flappy was hip and it was acquiring new players everyday. The demand was high and suddenly the supply vanished! Not for long.. as expected many developers saw the opportunity to fulfill this demand which resulted in a flood of Flappy Bird clones. Some clones had small changes from the original; the bird was replaced by all kind of different characters, the pipes became boxes, poles, force fields, all sort of crazy things.. but the game core was exactly the same. That was their goal, they didn't want to make a new original game they just wanted to be quick and be the first to replace the supply, that Flappy Bird was providing, by making a very similar game.

Flappy Bieber - Make Justin Bieber fly between the pipes!

In the mid-time Flappy Bird was inspiring other people (me included) to create their own original games. Single developers gained hope! It is possible to create on our own a mobile game and to be successful. I was aware that the odds of success are extremely low, but well they must be better than winning the lottery and the prize is still big! Simple games are succeeding time and time again. After Flappy Bird we had 2048, Timberman and many others. It's a very interesting time, the lone developers feel that they have a chance to compete with big game companies.

Hunger Race - My first mobile game

I have decided to make my own mobile game. It is also a very simple game, which I think is the key of success for these low budget games. Using similar mechanics of the Flappy Bird (and other games, e.g. Badland) I added an important twist! Inspired by the Nature I decided that every time we tapped the screen the bird would fly but, as in Nature, every movement has an energy cost so the more you move the more you will need to eat in order to restore that energy. My game is called Hunger Race. In this game we're controlling the flight of a Dragon and our goal is to make him travel the furthest possible. However flying makes our Dragon very hungry and he needs to be eating constantly healthy fruits in order to fly with the necessary speed. So the perfect strategy is to maximize the number of fruits the Dragon eats while minimizing the number of movements (taps)! I also added multiplayer and special boosts to make the game more interesting. For example, we can use a "Weaker Gravity" boost that will halve the gravity making our Dragon fly higher and further with a single tap. Therefore, when this boost is active the player doesn't need to tap as much, saving the Dragon precious energy.

Hunger Race - Multiplayer

I have learned new things while making this game and now I have a product on App Store which feels great! I think Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird's creator, who was having hatred feelings about his game, as one can read in one of its twits: 

I can call 'Flappy Bird' is a success of mine, but it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.

has all the reasons to be happy about himself and his game. Flappy Bird inspired many developers to work, learn and try to succeed in the gaming business!.. And well, it also made him a lot of money, so he got that going for him, which is nice.

P.S.
Hunger Race is currently available only on the AppStore and you can download it for free here:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id870410181

I will soon create the Android and Windows Phone versions, in the mid-time you can check out the game trailer:

Hope you enjoy it! Give me some feedback.

Google's and Facebook's laziness creates opportunity for StartUps

Ever tried to search for stuff to do for the next weekend? If you are in a foreign city it's kinda hard to know about the city's activities you don't know who to ask and where to look for. When trying to find anything the obvious choice would be Google. However and most surprisingly when looking for events, Google isn't that helpful.. I tried to find a party searching for something like "san francisco sunday party" but a bunch of irrelevant information shows up. Also surprisingly Facebook, with a huge database of events, doesn't provide a good way to search for them, either you know the name of the event or you get invited for the event or you won't find it!

Well for me it's a big mystery why the big players don't provide a nice way to find events, to search them by location, dates, categories, etc.. There is lot of money in this market besides all the profits a search engine makes with ads, and I bet event promoters would pay even more to get their event appear on top of an events' search engine, there's also the chance of getting a commission for selling the tickets.

While the big players refuse to play this game others have the opportunity to play it. Eventbrite is probably the most known and most successful search engine for events out there. They do an excellent job providing an online and easy way to obtain the tickets. But in terms of easily finding relevant events I thought that I could do better and so I decided to build my own search engine of events.

I never had made a Website before so I had to do some intensive learning. I started my study with HTML/CSS and then gone to Javascript. I have been programming in Python for 7 years and I had some experience with C++ so learning the basics of web programming was faster than usually. For the server side I decided to go with Django since I already knew Python and the Django framework is beautifully documented in the free online Django Book. The hard part was going from the development server to the production server on Amazon Web Services, banged my head against the wall many times.. As for the design of the logos/buttons/banners I didn't even try!! A friend of mine (web designer) came to rescue and did an excellent job.

Finally, after 5 months, the search engine Let's Get Beezy was born! The users can control exactly the search region by using Google Maps. They are searching for Facebook events and so they have all the social information that comes along with it. One of the most valuable information (from the feedback of my current users) is showing the number of women and men going to each event allowing the users to avoid sausage fests and choose the best parties to go to. The site also shows all the photos that were taken in the place of the event and posted on Instagram and has a rating system to evaluate the events' creators.

It is very recent website and may not have many events in your region. If that's the case please log in the site using your Facebook account for us to populate our database with events from your region.

I am very interested in having some feedback regarding Let's Get Beezy and why you think the big players haven't yet provide us with an easy way to search for events!
Leave a comment bellow!