In less than an hour, I'd changed Flappy Crocodile into Flappy Ryan. I compiled the new code, feeling more than a little surprised when the iPhone simulator launched successfully, allowing me to direct my own head through a gauntlet of pipes. I opened up Photo Booth and snapped a selfie, cut out my head using Photoshop, then replaced the crocodile sprite with my face. Then I found the folder containing the files for animating the crocodile. A drag and a drop later, Flappy Crocodile's cheery background song became "Type of Way" by Rich Homie Quan. With minimal effort and zero coding required, I could now start replacing any of the game's art or sound with my own files. To prove it, I bought a license to use Flappy Crocodile. You don't need any special skills at all. But what do you do then? Don't you need programming skills to actually modify the code? 1 free game on the App Store earlier this week, is based on his engine.Īnyone with a C-note and ten seconds can license the source code to a videogame. Svarc says Tiny Flying Drizzy, which was the No. So far, he says, about 100 developers have paid him $100 each to use Flappy Crocodile. "When I saw the media attention Flappy Bird was getting," Svarc said, "I knew this a ride I need to be on." App templates would allow developers to build trendy apps in no time. Speed, he thought, was key to taking advantage of that. Svarc watched the App Store and noticed that any time an app made waves, similar apps would be buoyed to the top. "Using templates cuts the cost and time down, and it allows you to get your products out there quickly." "When building a website, there is no need to start from scratch as there plenty of templates out there to choose from," Svarc said. "I had no idea what a Flappy Bird was," Storm said. Never mind that he'd only heard of Flappy Bird the week before. He uploaded the game on February 12, just two days after Flappy Bird flew the coop. One of the most downloaded of this unlikely sub-genre is Flappy Miley Wrecking Ball Pro, created by Gregory Storm. There's Flappy Wings, Splashy Fish, even Crappy Bird.įor some reason, a surprising number of these apps, like Flying Cyrus, Cyrus Flyer and Jumping Miley, feature the disembodied head of pop star Miley Cyrus. That explains why 95 of the 300 or so new apps released on Apple's iTunes store one day last week were riffs on Flappy Bird, the mega-hit its creator pulled at the height of its popularity. You'll need a halfway decent idea, of course, but once you've got that nailed down, you can easily buy the source code, get an online tutorial on how to use it and within hours have a game ready to play. All you need is 100 bucks and a free afternoon. You don't need to be a programmer to break into the App Store's top charts.
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