DevLog 20250711: Flappy Bird in Divooka! (Sneak Peak)

Sneak Peek

I'm very excited to share some updates, along with this early demo video of making and playing Flappy Bird in Divooka! Please take a look at our YouTube for the HD video!

There's a lot of technology packed into and behind this little demo.
Sure, there are hacks here and there - like all video games - and there's still tons to be done to make it production-ready and robust. But I think this is a good, solid proof-of-concept! We are at least at parity with what Unreal Engine Blueprint can achieve for interactive 2D games!

Overview

Divooka by Methodox is our flagship visual programming language and programming platform.

In the YouTube video, I shared a quick demo of the program setup, graph layout, and runtime behavior of Flappy Bird made in Divooka.

This setup is entirely done in the Divooka procedural context as a proof of concept for competitive runtime performance, suitability for practical program development, general applicability of the Divooka language, and the availability of Glaze! - our real-time graphical application API.

A detailed tutorial, along with all resource files, will be shared under the Methodox Wiki when the time comes.

Dev Process

The latest update on the procedural context visual debugger has been really helpful!

For the purpose of this particular demo, I started in Divooka, then realized lots of missing pieces. So I drafted the API for Glaze! first, then did a benchmark in C# - so actually, there is a pure C# implementation before the Divooka implementation.

The urgent need for generics becomes evident when we don't have structs and other OOP constructs in Divooka - we need a way to contain tuples of values in collections.

Commentary

Unreal Engine can already do it - and we're just catching up. On the other hand, Unreal Engine actually packs a similar size - but with way more features! Reducing distribution size is something that will require tremendous effort from us.