It's been about 4 months since I released Flippy Bard, and I thought it would be good to look back and reflect (and to think how weird it is that a few months is long enough for something to be considered "dead and gone" in this day and age.)
One of the highlights of making the game was getting Genzoman to make a piece of art featuring Filip the Flippy Bard. I really hope to make more character driven work in the future, because he just makes any character look cool, even one as lame as Filip.
I had originally intended to submit the game to the Flappy Jam, but things got a little crazy that week and I forgot all about it. In the end there were a few other games by the title of "Flippy Bard", which was pretty neat to see how other people envisioned the result of the same play on words. One of these games ended up being released on ios and needed to change its name to "The Flippy Bard" because I had already claimed the title (whereas on Google Play multiple games can have the same name, so when I put my game out after another game of the same name he referred to his game as "the original.") Just one of the other odd intricacies of the digital stores.
The game was even featured on Destructoid, which was pretty funny. Although I wish someone would have contacted me first for a quote, so anyone who stumbled upon the article knew it was more of a joke than an assumed cash grab. Luckily they added a link to my blog after, but I don't think any "damage was done" so no biggie.
I knew there would be a few clones, but if I knew how many clones there would have been when I first made my game, I would have never released it. It's pretty disgusting. There was even a version which used the mountain goat art from DuckTales Remastered, with wings added on.
I'm happy to report I've made almost $50 in ad revenue and in app purchases. Not very much money, and I can't say that I am a big fan of ads in a game. Since I never got in-app purchases working for the ios version working (to disable ads) I have decided to just rip ads out of the app and sell the game instead. I really don't see a point to the ads; they slow down the game, they make the already cheap game feel more cheap somehow, and ironically enough most of the ads which popped up were other "flappy" clones which I'm sure pulled people away. Because of making this title I've learned the ins and outs of ads (luckily on a game I do't care about, and as a result I don't plan on making a game with ads ever again (unless I have a successful premium title being cloned and I can put out the best free version, but that's some wishful thinking.)
So all in all I made less than I donate to Child's Play, Go Fund Me, Kiva, and numerous other things my wife supports. It is my goal to always donate at least %50 of the earnings of Flippy Bard to charity, until all the debt is payed off then I will donate %100 or more. So in the rare event people come back to playing "flappy" titles and choose to play the heck out of this one, it will be for a good cause.
I'm really glad I made Flippy Bard. It was something which began as a one line joke, and turned into something I had fun while in the process of making it, despite it being just a "joke game." But I don't anticipate doing this kind of thing ever again.
