How to Make Flappy Bird in JavaScript with Phaser

6 min readFeb 5, 2022

Important note: this tutorial uses Phaser v2, to learn about Phaser v3 check this tutorial on my own website lessmilk.com/phaser-game-tutorial/

Flappy Bird is a nice little game with easy to understand mechanics, and I thought it would be a perfect fit for a short tutorial. We are going to make a simplified version of Flappy Bird in only 65 lines of JavaScript with the Phaser framework version 2.4.

Phaser is a free, open source, and awesome framework to make games playable in any web browser.

Set Up

To start this tutorial you should download this empty template that I made. In it you will find:

phaser.min.js, the Phaser framework v2.4.3.
index.html, where the game will be displayed.
main.js, a file where we will write all our code.
assets/, a directory with 2 images and one sound effect.

Empty Project

The first thing we are going to do is to build an empty project.

Open the index.html file and add this code.

<!DOCTYPE html>  
<html>
    <head>  
        <meta charset="utf-8" />
        <title> Flappy Bird Clone </title>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="phaser.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="main.js"></script>
    </head>    <body>    </body>  
</html>

This simply load our two JavaScript files.

In the main.js file we add this to create an empty Phaser game.

// Create our 'main' state that will contain the game
var mainState = {
    preload: function() { 
        // This function will be executed at the beginning     
        // That's where we load the images and sounds 
    },    create: function() { 
        // This function is called after the preload function     
        // Here we set up the game, display sprites, etc.  
    },    update: function() {
        // This function is called 60 times per second    
        // It contains the game's logic   
    },
};// Initialize Phaser, and create a 400px by 490px game
var game = new Phaser.Game(400, 490);// Add the 'mainState' and call it 'main'
game.state.add('main', mainState); // Start the state to actually start the game
game.state.start('main');

All we have to do to make a game with Phaser is to fill the preload(), create() and update() functions.

The Bird

Let’s first focus on adding a bird to the game that will jump when we press the spacebar key.

The code below is quite simple and well commented, so you should be able to understand it. For better readability I removed the Phaser initialization and states management code that you can see above.

First we update the preload(), create() and update() functions.

preload: function() { 
    // Load the bird sprite
    game.load.image('bird', 'assets/bird.png'); 
},create: function() { 
    // Change the background color of the game to blue
    game.stage.backgroundColor = '#71c5cf';    // Set the physics system
    game.physics.startSystem(Phaser.Physics.ARCADE);    // Display the bird at the position x=100 and y=245
    this.bird = game.add.sprite(100, 245, 'bird');    // Add physics to the bird
    // Needed for: movements, gravity, collisions, etc.
    game.physics.arcade.enable(this.bird);    // Add gravity to the bird to make it fall
    this.bird.body.gravity.y = 1000;      // Call the 'jump' function when the spacekey is hit
    var spaceKey = game.input.keyboard.addKey(Phaser.Keyboard.SPACEBAR);
    spaceKey.onDown.add(this.jump, this);     
},update: function() {
    // If the bird is out of the screen (too high or too low)
    // Call the 'restartGame' function
    if (this.bird.y < 0 || this.bird.y > 490) {
        this.restartGame();
    }
},

And just below this code we add these two new functions.

// Make the bird jump 
jump: function() {
    // Add a vertical velocity to the bird
    this.bird.body.velocity.y = -350;
},// Restart the game
restartGame: function() {
    // Start the 'main' state, which restarts the game
    game.state.start('main');
},

Testing

Running a Phaser game directly in a browser doesn’t work, that’s because JavaScript is not allowed to load files from your local file system. To solve that we will have to use a webserver to play and test our game.

There are multiple ways to set up a local web server. Here’s my favourite technique using the Terminal:

Navigate to the project’s directory cd first-game/.
Type python -m http.server 8888 (or python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888 if you are using Python 2).
And then open the url http://localhost:8888 in your browser.

Once done, you should see this on your screen.

The Pipes

A Flappy Bird game without obstacles (the green pipes) is not really interesting, so let’s change that.

First, we load the pipe sprite in the preload() function.

game.load.image('pipe', 'assets/pipe.png');

Since we are going to handle a lot of pipes in the game, it’s easier to use a Phaser feature called “group”. The group will simply contain all of our pipes. To create the group we add this in the create() function.

// Create an empty group
this.pipes = game.add.group();

Now we need a new function to add a pipe in the game. We can do that with a new function.

addOnePipe: function(x, y) {
    // Create a pipe at the position x and y
    var pipe = game.add.sprite(x, y, 'pipe');    // Add the pipe to our previously created group
    this.pipes.add(pipe);    // Enable physics on the pipe 
    game.physics.arcade.enable(pipe);    // Add velocity to the pipe to make it move left
    pipe.body.velocity.x = -200;     // Automatically kill the pipe when it's no longer visible 
    pipe.checkWorldBounds = true;
    pipe.outOfBoundsKill = true;
},

The previous function creates one pipe, but we need to display 6 pipes in a row with a hole somewhere in the middle. So let’s create a new function that does just that.

addRowOfPipes: function() {
    // Randomly pick a number between 1 and 5
    // This will be the hole position
    var hole = Math.floor(Math.random() * 5) + 1;    // Add the 6 pipes 
    // With one big hole at position 'hole' and 'hole + 1'
    for (var i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
        if (i != hole && i != hole + 1) {
            this.addOnePipe(400, i * 60 + 10);
        }
    }
},

Here’s an image to make things more clear, for when hole = 2.

To actually add pipes in our game we need to call the addRowOfPipes() function every 1.5 seconds. We can do this by adding a timer in the create() function.

this.timer = game.time.events.loop(1500, this.addRowOfPipes, this);

Now you can save your file and test the code. This is slowly starting to look like a real game.

Scoring and Collisions

The last thing we need to finish the game is adding a score and handling collisions. And this is quite easy to do.

We add this in the create() function to display the score in the top left.

this.score = 0;
this.labelScore = game.add.text(20, 20, "0", { font: "30px Arial", fill: "#ffffff" });

And we put this in the addRowOfPipes(), to increase the score by 1 each time new pipes are created.

this.score += 1;
this.labelScore.text = this.score;

Next, we add this line in the update() function to call restartGame() each time the bird collides with a pipe from the pipes group.

game.physics.arcade.overlap(this.bird, this.pipes, this.restartGame, null, this);

And we are done! Congratulations, you now have a Flappy Bird clone in HTML5.

What’s Next?

The game is working but it’s a little bit boring. Try to make it better by adding sounds and animations.

To learn more about game development, make sure to follow me on Twitter: @thomaspalef.