Learn How to make Angry Birds | Hacker News Reader

Learn How to make Angry Birds

wildbunny.co.uk

160 pointsneinsun24 comments

This is the first time I've seen the free tutorial with the option to buy the source and assets. I think this is a very interesting way to solve the problem of monetizing while still allowing uncrippled content.

What is interesting to me is that the concepts in the article are arguably more valuable the sample code itself. But by charging for the shallower of the two assets, you end up charging the people who are more likely to pay in the first place.

This guy has some other really great articles if you search around his blog a bit. Here's few I have bookmarked.

http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/04/06/physics-engines-f...

http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/04/20/collision-detecti...

http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/03/25/speculative-conta...

This is great, the idea of deconstructing well known games as a teaching method is pretty cool.

Knowing the effect that you are hoping to achieve while reading the code really helps in understanding the implementation.

Very nice, keep them coming :)

Not games but anything. I'd love to read a "write nginx" or "write lua" :)

Have you seen this? http://createyourproglang.com/

Is it really worth 40 dollars?

and what is with the lousy exchange rate. Ugh. Worse than paypal.

stick with Jack Crenshaw's "Let's build a compiler" http://www.penguin.cz/~radek/book/lets_build_a_compiler.pdf It is free and doesn't make bogus promises (also written well like his Embedded Systems Programming columns).

Slightly on a tangent, but some may find this interesting. Super Mario World Camera Logic Review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCIMPYM0AQg

Wow that was really interesting.

The thing I found most surprising was at the end when he was able to go off the screen by going backwards which very much seems like a bug in their algorithm, but maybe "it's a feature".

That game definitely has good camera management though. I never sat down and thought about how elaborate their scheme was.

Thanks for the feedback, guys :) Didn't notice I'd been posted on here until now...

There is a new article in the works as well; stay tuned :)

You might be also interested in this Game Art for a similar game, under a CC license: http://www.vickiwenderlich.com/2011/07/game-art-squirrel-att...

Too bad this is flash based. An html5 version would have been more interesting to me.

Maybe some ambitious person could do an HTML5 or Android version and put it on github?

Let us know when you've built it!

Why? HTML5 isn't a very good platform for building games.

Why do you say so? Aside from sound (HTML5 audio is a poor fit for in-game sounds) what is not good about it? Especially with canvas getting hardware accelerated in IE9, Firefox and Chrome and WebGL getting ground in more browsers (Chrome, Firefox and now Opera Alpha).

EDIT: to be clear, it's genuine question, I'm really interested in high-performant graphics in HTML5.

Audio support is a giant, basic problem. Games have sound.

Beyond that, all the code is in Javascript and out in the open, and the performance of Canvas isn't any better than Flash's software renderer.

You mention that hardware accelerated Canvas is going to arrive eventually in certain browsers, but hardware accelerated Flash has already shipped (as of last week). As well, Epic announced that Unreal Engine has been ported to the platform.

Aside from doomlaser's answer, have you seriously seen a single demo in HTML5? As I've not seen one yet that doesn't stutter or crash. Even in Chrome with v8.

HTML5 is like 5 years behind Flash in terms of performance.

Also writing in HTML5 at the moment is like being given the total basics. Canvas, as an API, sucks. It'll get better, more libraries will come out, but god-damn it feels like moving backwards to take a step forwards.

You mean like this? http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

Coming from a HTML5 community, I can say that our games have evolved pretty quicky (audio + visual). We're getting closer to Flash in terms of performance, tools and support.

Awesome tutorial. This is the first time I have seen a tutorial that actually goes end-to-end.

And pretty cool that he has chosen an already existing game here. Pretty smooth!

...feed them alka seltzer?

throw rocks at them

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