Flappy Bird
High Level Design Hardware Design Software Design Results Conclusions Appendix
High Level Design Hardware Design Software Design Results Conclusions Appendix
Background

Flappy Bird on RP2040

Helen Ni (hn347), Selena Zhang (scz6), Matthew Amorocho (ma969)

Project Demo

Overview

This project implements a complete recreation, and expansion, of Dong Nguyen's popular 2013 mobile game, Flappy Bird. The game is structured like the original, including gravity-based motion, scrolling obstacles, hand-drawn sprites, scoring, and sound effects. Our version expands upon this by introducing multi-modal gameplay, letting the player use either a button, their voice, or a handheld remote to generate flaps. Our project was implemented on the RP2040 microcontroller, generating a 640×480 VGA video signal entirely in software while simultaneously handling real-time input, physics, optimized collision detection, and audio synthesis.

The motivation for this project was to recreate a game we had enjoyed when younger, while also exploring the limits of what can be achieved on a resource-constrained microcontroller. Generating VGA video, mixing audio, and handling sensor input concurrently presents a high workload for the system, so we met timing constraints by making optimizations like only checking the pipe nearest to the bird for collisions, or using fixed-point arithmetic.