Talking about Puppet Bird game, Game development, HTML5, Javascript and Phaser.
Some years ago I had a couple of hours of fun playing Puppet Bird, a game in the Flappy Bird family, which unfortunately seems to be no longer available on the stores, but if you do not know the game, here it is a video of the gameplay:
You control a little string-secured puppet with a wheel at the bottom of the screen and move it through a moving obstacle course.
In this first part, we’ll build a prototype to move the character in this original way.
The core of the concept is you must drag to rotate a wheel, or a crank, and since there is no need to reinvent the wheel, there is an interesting plugin by rexrainbow at this page.
This is what I was able to build in about 50 lines of code:
Drag and rotate the crank to raise or lower the bird.
The two red circles define the active drag area. It’s quite fun to control a character this way, isn’t it? The original game was flawed by too much ads and a too hard gameplay, with a lot of obstacles, but I still think there is potential in this prototype.
And here it is the completely commented source code, for you to enjoy and improve the prototype:
let game;
let gameOptions = {
// min and max radius from crank centre where dragging is allowrd
dragRadius: [50, 250],
// ratio between crank rotation, in degrees, and rope movement, in pixels
crankRatio: 0.3
}
window.onload = function() {
let gameConfig = {
type: Phaser.AUTO,
backgroundColor: 0x222222,
scale: {
mode: Phaser.Scale.FIT,
autoCenter: Phaser.Scale.CENTER_BOTH,
parent: "thegame",
width: 750,
height: 1334
},
scene: playGame
}
game = new Phaser.Game(gameConfig);
window.focus();
}
class playGame extends Phaser.Scene {
constructor() {
super("PlayGame");
}
preload() {
// load plugin responsible of drag rotate, see the official page at
// https://rexrainbow.github.io/phaser3-rex-notes/docs/site/dragrotate/
this.load.plugin("rexdragrotateplugin", "dragrotate-plugin.js", true);
this.load.image("crank", "crank.png");
this.load.image("rope", "rope.png");
this.load.image("bird", "bird.png");
}
create() {
// rope sprite
this.rope = this.add.sprite(game.config.width / 2, game.config.height / 3, "rope");
// set registration point to the bottom
this.rope.setOrigin(0.5, 1);
// bird sprite
this.bird = this.add.sprite(game.config.width / 2, game.config.height / 3, "bird");
// crank sprite
this.crank = this.add.sprite(game.config.width / 2, game.config.height / 4 * 3, "crank");
// here I just draw two circles to show drag area
let graphics = this.add.graphics();
graphics.lineStyle(4, 0xff0000, 1);
graphics.strokeCircle(this.crank.x, this.crank.y, gameOptions.dragRadius[0]);
graphics.strokeCircle(this.crank.x, this.crank.y, gameOptions.dragRadius[1]);
// drag rotate plugin instance
let dragRotate = this.plugins.get("rexdragrotateplugin").add(this, {
// horizontal coordinate of origin point
x: this.crank.x,
// vertical coordinate of origin point
y: this.crank.y,
// dragging is valid when distance between touch pointer and
// origin position is larger then minRadius and less then maxRadius.
minRadius: gameOptions.dragRadius[0],
maxRadius: gameOptions.dragRadius[1]
});
// the core of the script, "drag" listener
dragRotate.on("drag", function(e) {
// deltaAngle is the dragging angle around origin position, in degrees
// we determine new rope position according to dragging angle
let newPosition = this.rope.y + e.deltaAngle * gameOptions.crankRatio;
// we are going to limit rope position to prevent bird to fly off the screen
if(newPosition > 50 && newPosition < game.config.height / 4 * 3) {
// adjust rope position
this.rope.y += e.deltaAngle * gameOptions.crankRatio;
// adjust bird position
this.bird.y += e.deltaAngle * gameOptions.crankRatio;
// adjust crank angle
this.crank.angle += e.deltaAngle
}
}, this);
}
}
Next time we’ll add some enemies, and maybe this old game may get a new life, meanwhile download the source code.
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