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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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