122 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] thread
Are you supposed to get it to go through the space between the "stars"? Is it even possible?

Edit: Got my first point (50 - 100 tries?). You need to make it go a full orbit without touching the outer circle. This seems obvious in retrospect.

Edit 2: And they knock each other out of orbit. This is fun.

(comment deleted)
No, just have as many "satellites" in orbit as possible simultaneously. The game is continuous. I got up to 5 and gave up ;)
I got 4 and was very, very proud of myself. That said, if it were controllable through spacebar, I'd play a lot longer.
I've been playing using the spacebar... Debian/Chromium
It might be more clear how the game works on first playthrough if it starts with a bird in orbit and a score of 1.
There, I finally got a bird to stay in orbit and a new one appeared on the ground. Score: one. I triumph!

(Now I'd better leave it alone or the next hour or two will disappear.)

I couldn't get past 5 without them colliding, at least with the minimal effort I put into this game. Really cool though.
So bad, why don't they support the space key and instead use click? Trackpads/touchpads are not good for that at all.
You are right on that. I can't send any bird to space. my bad luck.
Neat idea. Probably would improve if you go with click-hold rather than tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, or at least enable the ability. Also, needs more Mario pipes :)
(comment deleted)
"The developer has not uploaded a game yet..." are we overloading the server?
It's fixed! The itch.io team has be great on this issue
(comment deleted)
still getting that error
I was for awhile after he said it was fixed but it works for me. Try opening it in an incognito tab in case of a caching issue. Otherwise, just use the mirror.
Sorry, the page was cached for 10 minutes and it wasn't cleared after deploying fix.
5.

Really cool though.

I set up some really crazy orbits :-D

http://imgur.com/3HA4ubl

One of those birds is in a circular orbit one bird-height above the ground!

Another is in a very eccentric orbit that skims the ground when it comes to the bottom-right of the screen, then almost grazes the asteroids in the top-left.

The one thing I don't like is that this game's physics don't seem to behave properly. In real life (and in Kerbal Space Program) you burn at apogee to increase the height of your perigee, or burn at perigee to increase the height of your apogee. But that rule doesn't seem to apply to Flappy Space Program, making this game anti-educational. :-(
Hi, dev here. I certify you that the physics are OKish. You should burn at apoapsis to circularize, etc. What prevent you to realize this is that it's hard to know when you're at apo/periapsis, so you're burning with some vertical velocity and that changes how your orbit change. Anyway, this game was really a joke, if you want an educational game, I've also made this: http://deltav.corpsmoderne.net/
This game is super fun even though it's a joke. Might I suggest that once your bird has left the cloud layer, all subsequent burns are purely prograde? (To deal with the edge case where the bird reenters the atmosphere, the rule could be that all burns are purely prograde if the bird has ever left the atmosphere). I think a lot of people will play this game and the Hohmann Transfer concept would be a cool thing for them to be able to take away.
+1 for the delta-v game!

Here's a reddit thread about the game with a "high score list": http://www.reddit.com/r/gravity_games/comments/1fks9v/oc_del...

If anyone wants to test out their orbital mechanics skillz, you can try to beat my unofficial world record, a grand tour of the Jovian moons:

http://deltav.corpsmoderne.net/game.html?s=Jupiter&prg=QlVST...

I took on your challenge, determined to do it from scratch with no copying, and I have this:

http://deltav.corpsmoderne.net/game.html?s=Jupiter&prg=QlVST...

More points, due to orbits of and impact with Jupiter, but slightly less efficient and elegant overall I dare say - some burns not really at peri-/apo-apsis, and my orbits are generally higher and less circular. Kudos also for motivating me.

> I certify you that the physics are OKish

A++++ would physics again

it is damn hard to for me to escape the close orbit bird. I have managed that feat a few times but I like getting four out there and seeing how long before they intersect.

I get a serious "solar system" vibe instead of satellite vibe when playing this game, as in how would comets move through a system and such but on a simplified scale

Suggestions. Decrease the number of clicks slightly when using a mouse. The fingers hurt trying to go that fast. Alternatively, add spacebar support.

Absolutely unplayable on a phone. Bind to touchdown events on mobile. Click events have a 300ms delay. Make the game full screen for mobile.

Spacebar works for me...
For me, it works only after the page is scrolled all the way down to the bottom (so I can only see half the canvas)
Implementing Fastclick.js would make it work on the phone: https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick

"FastClick is a simple, easy-to-use library for eliminating the 300ms delay between a physical tap and the firing of a click event on mobile browsers. The aim is to make your application feel less laggy and more responsive while avoiding any interference with your current logic."

(comment deleted)
It was really not fun for me until I realized that once the window has focus any key press gives a little boost. Its much more comfortable to stroke each key on the home row in rapid succession than to pound on one key :)
Well there goes my spacebar from ferociously whacking it.
Flappy Bird meets KSP.

This is possibly the best Flappy Bird -type game I've seen.

I read through the source and was surprised at its simplicity and readability.

http://storage.googleapis.com/itchio/tmp/main.js

No funky frameworks , just plain old jQuery and some JS.

I've just begun learning JS and the source was very informative.

Meh, don't use best practices for assigning functions to variables, but other than that looks pretty readable.
What are the best practices for assigning functions to variables?
(comment deleted)
When I double click on the canvas it selects it.

You can fix it by adding:

    user-select: none;
    user-drag: none;
With appropriate vendor prefixes.
Once you figure out the space bar cadence, that Flappy Kessler Syndrome[1] is gonna hit you hard any time above 3 bird's.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

You get the gold medal with 16 flying birds. By the time I reached it I had prevented 12k collisions. Spanning at random position would help to create different orbits.
I've had some success with doing sub-orbital hops before taking off finally for orbit, to move myself to a new launch position. Doesn't really work well if you have birds in orbits with very low peris though.
This is unnecessary - it's functionally equivalent to just waiting a moment before launching for the orbiting birds to progress. There's nothing absolute about the positioning of the launching bird, it's all only relative to the orbiting birds.
Changing the initial launch position makes it easier to choose what area of the planet the periapsis will be over. When I launch the birds, unless I take great care to do otherwise, my periapsis tends to slightly after my launch position.

With periapsis's in different positions, you can get birds into rarely colliding 'resonances' of sorts. Making sure that the periapsis of birds is not over the default starting location is also good to ensure that you do not lose orbiting birds to a pre-launch bird.

Too true. The first two times I reached six, I was shortly thereafter knocked down to one or two by collisions.
Great! Now add the green tubes for extra difficulty :p