Flippy Uncle

One tap. Infinite flips. A game made with love, perseverance, and a toy keyboard.

Flippy Uncle was my ode to early-2010s mobile simplicity — that era of one-tap brilliance that made Flappy Bird and Crossy Road impossible to put down. Bright 8-bit art, cheerful music, and a single, perfect mechanic: tap to keep Uncle airborne. Miss a beat, and down he goes.

What’s inside

• Simple, skill-based gameplay – one tap controls everything.

• Colorful 8-bit style – vibrant pixel worlds that feel equal parts arcade and Saturday-morning cartoon.

• Original music – recorded on my son’s toy keyboard and stitched into a full chiptune-style soundtrack.

• Three endless stages – quick sessions, endless replay.

• Unlockable characters - multiple pixel art avatars, each with their own physics.

How it was made

I built Flippy Uncle in 2016, waking up around 5 a.m. every day to squeeze in an hour of development before my full-time engineering job. My son was preschool-age then, and those mornings were a blur of code and cereal bowls. I’d work in the basement while he slept, then walk him to preschool, sharing breakfast and silly conversations along the way.

Those months were exhausting, but also golden: late-night debugging balanced by bedtime stories, early prototypes scored with toy-keyboard melodies, and weekend adventures playing old Sierra games together (Eco Quest, Torin’s Passage, even a few questionable Space Quest choices — sorry about the sandworms, kiddo).

Why it matters

Looking back, Flippy Uncle feels bright and full of heart — the culmination of everything I’d learned from smaller jam projects before stepping into more complex mobile development. I'm still impressed with the level of polish I was able to put on this project. It taught me about design discipline, scope control, and the quiet power of showing up every morning, one tap at a time.

Originally released for iOS and Android in 2016.
Re-released in 2025 as part of the Anachronic Archives, preserving a small, joyful relic of the indie mobile boom — and a very real slice of my life.

May require legacy settings to run on modern devices.