Marketplace Highlight - Flappy Dragon 🐉

A few other designers, admins and I have calls from time to time. Usually to relax and enjoy some games, but sometimes we also discuss projects or brainstorm for the next Marketplace hype. I showed them a quick project I made in less than a day. Sometimes I just get these bursts of inspiration and motivation and try and create it as fast as I can!

@Yamin agreed that it would be a cool concept to try on the Marketplace. Sometimes it's better to create something simplistic yet polished, rather than something incredibly complex and time-consuming.

The idea was simple. If the player walks forward, the dragon goes up. Pillars move from right to left. The dragon has to dodge the pillars and if they fail, the game ends.

Simple, right? But then... How do we boost replayability? Pillars should gradually speed up to make the game harder! There has to be a reliable detection system for when the dragon collides with a pillar! There should be a menu for the player to navigate through in their hotbar!

AaAaaAaaaaAand... Our project got a bit more complicated... It wasn't going to be finished as fast as my personal Java Edition version, but regardless it wouldn't take that long.



My personal version was created in Java Edition which is rather limited in comparison to what we can do on the Bedrock Edition. @Exciting_pancake wrote the code for the custom pillars and dragons that @Yamin created.


The first issue was that due to how the game worked, the player could change their FOV to be able to see outside of the background. The image below should better illustrate what I mean!


A second problem that we encountered throughout creating the behaviours for the pillars was that the collision detection system was often inaccurate. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to accurately detect collision using redstone only. @Exciting_pancake had to do some tweaking to the pillars' hitbox and after doing quite a bit of testing, we resolved the issue!

The third and final issue arose after Microsoft tested the project themselves. It did pass without any game-breaking issues, though the problem was that on less powerful devices, such as the iPhone 6, it would lag. The project got greylisted on low and mid-tier devices. We weren't necessarily required to resolve the lag, but that would mean we would miss out on a large portion of the player base. We decided to make some tweaks to improve the performance.



All our projects go through extensive testing before being shipped to Microsoft. The Design team and Marketplace QA team use Slack and Notion to communicate about the QA sessions and to coordinate them. Below is a screenshot of the first batch of bugs that were reported.