2026 · Solo project
Flappy Bird (Pygame)
A feature-complete Flappy Bird clone built in Pygame — day/night mode, three difficulty levels, persistent leaderboards, medal system, and a polished game-feel loop.
Context
Day 94 of the 100-days bootcamp. The brief is a small game with a tight feedback loop. The interesting question isn't whether I can recreate the mechanics — it's whether I can ship the bits that make the original feel good: the timing window, the difficulty curve, the medal screen, the leaderboard you keep coming back to.
Approach
Started from the bootcamp scaffold and kept going. Pygame handles the rendering and the input loop; the rest is data structures and a small state machine for menus, gameplay, game-over, and the high-score screen. The persistence layer is a flat-file JSON leaderboard — no database, no network, no dependencies beyond Pygame. Day/night mode, three difficulty presets, and the medal system are all driven from the same state.
Outcome
A small, complete thing. The most useful part was finishing it: a project with a defined scope, shipped, that I can point at when I want to talk about polish, persistence, and the difference between a working program and a finished one.
Stack
Python 3, Pygame, the standard library. Runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.