Tag: Orta Therox »

I spent the better part of my weekend playing Flappy Royale. I didn’t necessarily want to. I just felt like I had to. It’s a hypnotic experience that’s way too easy to just keep playing.

Flappy Royale is the brainchild of Orta Therox, Em Lazer-Walker, and Zach Gage. It's a very simple idea: Take the the rules of Battle Royale games (e.g. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends) and apply them to Flappy Bird. 100 players play as birds that jump out of a bus. From there, they must fly between as many pipes as possible until one player is deemed the champion.

The game controls pretty much exactly like Flappy Bird did back in 2013. The only real differences are the hopping out of the bus (presumably inspired by the Fortnite Battle Bus) and 99 ghost birds flapping on screen with you, all competing for the number one spot.

This latter element—the ability to see other players play while you do—is the secret sauce that makes Flappy Royale such a tantalizing challenge. You can always see your competition flapping alongside you, and you want beat all of them. If you can’t do that, maybe you settle for getting a top 50 finish before diving in again to see if you can do better.

Although it’s not officially released, anyone can go and download the beta release of the game here. In this early state though, the game is already quite popular. Here are some stats Orta Therox shared about the game over the weekend:

Oh… Damn. I was doing the stats wrong.

600,000 games were played on mobile native. 1,300,000 games were played on web.

In two days, there’s been almost 2 million games of Flappy Royale! pic.twitter.com/NmDwYngL2p

— ./orta --tsc (@orta) June 29, 2019

Current Flappy Royale statistics: 20 games started per second right now, with 600,000 games so far. Looks like folks average about 50 plays per session.

— ./orta --tsc (@orta) June 29, 2019

2 million games of Flappy Royale is really impressive, especially considering it populates each of those games with 100 players. Where it starts feeling downright magical is when you consider that all of these matches start pretty much instantly.

The way Flappy Royale eliminates any sort of queue times for matches is ingenious, and probably another big reason for the game’s stickiness. Instead of filling matches with bots or waiting for 100 live players to play a level at once, the game pits you against the ghost data of the last 99 players who played the level before you. In other words, you’re always playing against other people, but you don’t have to wait for them to log in for you to do so.

Right now, Flappy Royale really feels like it has huge potential. It successfully distills the most thrilling aspects of Battle Royale into a really tight mobile package. A lot of this has to do with how quick and easy it is to play ten rounds without blinking, so here’s to hoping the game doesn’t get too bloated with extra features or monetization schemes before it officially releases.

In my youth, back when I was still in a school that ranked students' progress through the educational system with numbers and our "top of the line" computer was a 256 color Macintosh (not Mac, a Macintosh), I played a lot of adventure games. Mostly because they were all that was available for our non-PC machine, but also because I really enjoyed them. A good many of them were old Sierra titles but I also dabbled quite a bit in text-based games. I still fondly remember getting my hands on a boxed collection of a lot of these things, including titles like Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I never beat any of them, but I would sit there and try for hours.

Now, I know there are some text-based adventure games and collections of text-based adventures games on the App Store already, but WibbleQuest is something different. It does allow users to partake in plenty of interactive reading, but it's real purpose is to create said experiences using a pre-constructed framework. Designed by Orta Therox, a developer with perhaps the most awesome name in existence, it's meant to be a pain-free (relatively speaking) tool for adventure manufacturing.

Users can craft their own tales with the aid of a couple of pre-built examples, and eventually work their way up to more extensive endeavors. They probably won't be creating a masterpiece right out of the gate, but with some practice (and some handy tutorials) they could presumably make a piece of interactive fiction about anything. As a former adventure-hound, this both pleases and excites me.

WibbleQuest isn't an app in the technical (or literal) sense, however. It's a prefab framework meant to be used on a computer. Games can be transferred to an iOS device for testing or just plain playing, but the actual creation takes place on either a laptop or desktop. Not an unexpected way of doing things, as I can only imagine how irritating it would be to try programming with a given device's keyboard.

The curious, anxious or even bored can check out WibbleQuest on its official website for free.