When launching, hover the bird at the edge of the atmosphere for a few clicks, to give it time to tilt into horizontal orientation, so your thrust can affect the orbital parameters. If you don't do this, you'll just thrust vertically into the outer barrier.

Circular orbits are best. Two objects in circular orbits at different altitudes can never collide.

High-altitude orbits are best, where there's more room for more objects.

So circular high-altitude is best, but it's not easy to get there. Standard orbital astromechanics apply: to circularize, thrust at apogee to raise your perigee. Problem is, it's not easy to tell when the bird is at apogee, and it may not even occur before you lose control of the bird and the next appears. Also, the thrusting resolution is rather coarse: if the apogee is any higher than about halfway to the edge, two clicks will send the bird into the barrier, so you only get one attempt. These details and coarse controls make the game a lot harder than it looks, just like the original Flappy.

Finally, if you just need that one more point to break your high score, launch the next bird into the lowest fastest orbit possible. That altitude should be clear if you launched all the other birds higher, and it will register quickly before any more collide. I managed 8 thanks to this.

http://storage.googleapis.com/itchio/tmp/main.js

No funky frameworks , just plain old jQuery and some JS.

I've just begun learning JS and the source was very informative.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Absolutely unplayable on a phone. Bind to touchdown events on mobile. Click events have a 300ms delay. Make the game full screen for mobile.

Edit: Got my first point (50 - 100 tries?). You need to make it go a full orbit without touching the outer circle. This seems obvious in retrospect.

Edit 2: And they knock each other out of orbit. This is fun.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-w...

I'm in the early stages of designing a junior high programming curriculum and think this may be a great example of an engaging, practical experiment.

  boost = function(duration, interval){
      setTimeout(function(){
          clearInterval(window.kp)
      }, duration)
      window.kp = setInterval(function(){
          $(document).keydown()
      }, interval)
  }

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/itchio/html/4923/spr...

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/itchio/html/4923/bg....

This would be top notch if the images were resized to provide crisp, well-pixelated edges. The spritesheets look great, in and of themselves, but the browsers scale them poorly.

This is possibly the best Flappy Bird -type game I've seen.

http://imgur.com/3HA4ubl

One of those birds is in a circular orbit one bird-height above the ground!

Another is in a very eccentric orbit that skims the ground when it comes to the bottom-right of the screen, then almost grazes the asteroids in the top-left.

(Now I'd better leave it alone or the next hour or two will disappear.)

You can fix it by adding:

    user-select: none;
    user-drag: none;

The recent "Flappy Bert" http://www.sesamestreet.org/cms-static/flappy_bert/ doesn't have this problem.