Until today, I didn’t test the game on other screen densities. But since almost all UI in the game is aligned to screen edges or middle of the screen, the number of elements which had to have hardcoded coordinates is minimal. The game helper class calculates positions depending on the device density for these few exceptions.

Also today I’ve run the game for the first time on a tablet. Well, it’s not smooth enough and there were few graphical glitches. I’ve optimized therefore a little bit the tubes rendering. Now everything is running more-less at a reasonable speed.

Time do to some testing if the game is hard enough like the original.

Today it was time to do some heavy refactoring mainly in the gameplay state. All drawing methods are moved to a new helper class, this gives me a better overview of the core features of the gameplay (tube generating, main character moving and collision detection) which I left in the gameplay state. All graphics are stored now in another new sprite class. This class can also handle alpha and translation animations of the objects on screen.

Finally, I’ve added collision detection between the bird and tubes. Also I animated the bird when flying up and down. This was the last piece of the puzzle to complete the gameplay.

I’ve thought about adding some sound effects, but decided maybe it’s better to play some old school funky chip tune. I’m using the libmod library for Android now for the first time for playing music. It’s very small, CPU efficient and resource friendly I must say. On the title screen the player can toggle the music if it’s too boring. The music is also stopped / resumed when the app is interupted by the system.

With two states finished (splash and gameplay) it was time to build a state manager which will take care of which state is active and linking all states together. I’ve thought first to do separate states for the title, gameplay and gameover screens, but the graphics and behaviour in these states are practially the same so I’ve made it as one state with different modes.

Next thing to do on the agenda are the buttons on title and gameover screen. I was afraid that I had to save the whole state of the app when launching, for example, the play store to rate the app; but somehow the SurfaceView handles these interrupts with no problems. So the button actions are now finished and I’ve added also a little pressed state animation like in the original game.

The whole game flow is nearly finished, meaning it’s time to replace all test graphics with the original. I’ve found all graphic resources from the original game as a big PNG image on the internet. It took me a little bit of time to cut it down to pieces. I’ve modified the title from “bird” to “beard”.

I’ve finished today also the scoreboard showing scores and medals. There are 4 kind of medals: bronze, silver, gold, platinum for scores over 10, 20, 30 and 40.

With all graphics cut down I’ve managed also to squeeze in the main characters animation in todays timeline.