From Dagen Brock's Entry on this program:

A while back, there was a post on a popular internet forum for retro computing about Flappy Bird. You know, that game that went viral and subsequently got pulled by the author. Anyway, it turns out that people had made versions for pretty much every old 8-bit computer under the sun... except one. There was no Flappy Bird for the Apple II! This upset me. The Apple II was and is extremely popular. We couldn't let ourselves be so underrepresented. I decided to take action.

I spent way more time on this than I had intended. I wanted to just hack out a junky version over the weekend and get on with things, but of course nothing ever works out that way. Development wasn't difficult, but I had a lot of personal things going on so it ended up taking me about 6 weeks of random 30 minute intervals to get it done. The first two weeks I pretty much had a working version. But I wanted to prove a point. I wanted my version to run at 60 FPS on a 1MHz Apple IIe with no flicker. So at the end of the first two weeks I realized that my generalized drawing code wouldn't be fast enough. I spent it took another two weeks to find time at night and on weekends to optimize all of the drawing routines. Finally after a month I had a pretty much optimized game engine. The final two weeks were the finishing touches like sound, high score and titles. This part was the easy and fun part.

Like all projects, I could keep going. It's not nearly done, but at the same time, it's been done for weeks. So I must release it now. There are *way* more interesting projects in my pipeline, and I'm anxious to get back to working on the more modern Apple IIgs architecture.

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