ddev0's comments

I have always felt there is something fascinating going on behind Flappy Birds' infamous difficulty curve that warrants deeper study.

On the one hand, there is no actual progression or ramping of difficulty in the game itself. The difficulty level remains the same whether your current score is 0 or 10 or 100. But every new highscore represents a new summit that the player has to scale. The first and maybe the most frustrating summit to scale is scoring a single point. To get your score into the double digits, the player has to have basic mastery of the core mechanics - including the precise physics, and timings- and learn how to handle a certain number of scenarios. The obstacles on the path to triple-digit territory and beyond seem almost self-imposed. The fear and tension as you approach your own highscore is the biggest impediment to breaking your highscore. Once you break that highscore - the hand tremors magically disappear the next time you approach it, only for it to re-appear as you near your new highscore.

All this, when the basic concept of the gameplay is deceptively simple. Like i said, there are many layers to unpack for someone who is willing to look into it.

Insightful comment. Do you have any book or youtube recommendations for casual readers like me - A programmer who is fascinated by engines and gets intrusive thoughts like "why ever happened to jetcars? " ( that nagging question again popped up when i read this headline - "Wait, Efficient at any speed"? "wasn't that one of the problems chrysler faced in the 60s ? could this work for roadcars?" )

You might be clicking on a bunch of links at once (triggering some anti-ddos/spam measure?). Happened to me once or twice. I assumed it might have been because my dynamic ip had been "used by robots" prior.

What you're looking for sounds like AppImages (https://appimage.org/) . I have only used them while downloading games from itch.io, etc. (since i prefer package managers) but they seem to work out of the box on popular distros.

Pou was (is?) paradoxically one of those highly popular games that noone has ever heard of - with half a billion downloads on the play store back in 2014+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pou_(video_game)