How to play Flappy Bully

Flappy Bully is a one-button flight over London chimneys. You play Douglas, a bull terrier, and the run lasts as long as he stays in the gap. This page is the rulebook: what the buttons do, when a point is scored, what can actually hit you, and what Day, Night and the other skies change. Nothing here is a house rule. It matches the game as it runs on flappybully.com.

Controls

Flap with a tap or a click on the sky, or with Space or the Up arrow. The first flap starts the run. Douglas is hovering in the middle until then, bobbing a little, and that opening flap is a real flap: he leaves the hover already climbing. Taps that land on a button do not flap. Pause, mute, Looks, Colours, Backgrounds and the trophy are all controls, not sky.

While you are flying, Pause (the button, or P, or Escape) freezes him. Gravity stops, the chimneys stop, and the pause card says he is hovering. Flaps are ignored until you resume. M, or the speaker button, mutes the flap, the score chime and the crash. Mute is remembered on the device, along with your best score.

After a crash, tapping the sky does nothing. The only restart is Fly again, and it stays locked for about a second so the tap that killed you cannot immediately start another run. If that run scored and you have not saved a name yet, Fly again asks before the score is dropped.

Scoring

You score one point for each chimney pair you clear. The point is awarded when the right-hand edge of the chimney cap passes a point just left of Douglas’s centre, so the chime comes a moment before he looks fully through. The score sits at the top left during the flight. Clouds never score, and there is no coin or combo on this course.

When you hit something, the card says Bonk. If the run beat the number stored on this device, it says New best and that number is written down. Your best is what opens looks, coat colours and backgrounds. The score of a run that you then fail to beat does not open anything on its own.

The trophy opens the leaderboard, a top 20 of named bests. A name is 3 to 16 letters or numbers, with no spaces, and two players cannot share one. If you already have a name, a higher score is posted when the run ends. From that board, Move to another device gives a one-time 8-character code, good for 30 minutes, which carries your name and best between the website, Flappy Bully Free and the 99p app. Type the code on the other device. It will not redeem on the device that made it.

Chimneys, the wall and the top of the screen

Three things end a run: a chimney, the top edge of the screen, and the brick wall along the bottom. Clouds are scenery. They drift and they do not collide.

Each obstacle is a pair of chimneys with a gap between them. The shaft is the narrower brick column. The cap is wider and sits on the inner end of each shaft, and both the shaft and the cap are solid. The open air you have to fly through is the space between those caps. On a screen 800 pixels tall that opening is 236 pixels. On any other height the whole course scales with the screen, so the gap stays the same fraction of the picture. The gap’s height is chosen at random between a margin under the top of the screen and a margin above the wall. Chimneys do not bob, and they do not move vertically once they appear.

Douglas’s collision box is smaller than the drawing and centred on his body: about two-thirds of the sprite’s width and a little under two-thirds of its height. Ears and tail are not the full hit. The top of the screen still counts. If that box crosses the top edge, the run ends, even though the sky looks empty. The same is true of the wall. There is no scrape-along-the-bricks grace.

Scroll speed does not rise with your score. What tightens is the wait before the next chimney is spawned. That wait starts at 1.55 seconds and shortens by 0.018 seconds for each point you already have, and it never goes below 1.12 seconds. The floor arrives at a score of about 24. After that, the course does not get denser, faster or narrower. The first chimney is queued 0.85 seconds after the opening flap and enters from the right. As the run begins, Douglas shifts from the middle of the screen to a bit over a quarter of the way across, and he stays on that vertical line for the rest of the flight. Only his height changes.

Day, Night and the other skies

Day and Night are open from the start. Every visit begins on Day, including a return visit where you had picked another background. The choice is not restored when the page loads. Open Backgrounds on the start screen and pick again for this sitting. You can change sky before you flap. You cannot change it in the middle of a run, because those buttons are only on the start screen.

A sky is a picture. It does not change gravity, flap strength, gap size, chimney speed or the hit box. Night is not a harder mode. Fog and Storm are the same chimneys with a picture that makes the gap harder to see, which is a reading problem, not a rule change. The other six skies open from your best score, one every 20:

Looks and coat colours

The plain Bully look is always available. Anything else waits on your best score, in steps of 20, and the look you choose stays on for the whole flight. It does not change by itself when the score passes a number. Looks and colours are separate lists, which is why the start screen has both buttons.

The 99p app has every look, colour and sky open. On Flappy Bully Free, from version 1.0.4, each of those menus can offer a rewarded ad that opens the next locked item in that list. The same menus have a 4-digit box for a code Forest Forge has given you. A code that matches opens everything on that device and remembers it there. Guessing is not part of the game, and a wrong code does nothing.

For the timing that actually raises a score, read the tips. For the dog himself, Douglas. To play, go back to the game, or get Flappy Bully Free or the 99p version on Google Play.