Flappy Dunk

This one was Jacob's pitch. He's seven, he loves basketball, he loves Flappy Bird, and one afternoon he asked me very seriously why nobody had ever combined them. (Other developers have, in fairness, but he didn't know that and his version is better anyway.) The credit on this game is his because the design is genuinely his — a flying basketball, hoops you have to fall through from above, fireballs as power-ups, and combo points for nothing-but-net swishes. I just typed.

The trick to scoring real combos is to not tap during the descent. Your instinct is to keep tapping for control, but every tap pushes the ball up, which means a clean drop straight through the centre of the hoop becomes nearly impossible. Tap to reach the right altitude above the hoop, then let go and let gravity do the actual scoring. Hitting three consecutive swishes activates the fireball multiplier which is where the silly-high scores come from.

From his mouth

Jacob's specifications, verbatim, when we started: "the basketball has to be on fire when you're doing good", "it has to make the swoosh sound", and "if you fall out of the sky you should bounce". The first two are in. The third one isn't — you just die. He's accepted this, mostly. If you also like one-tap basketball nonsense, try our Flappy Rocket, which is the spaceship version of the same physics.