Shake your phone to keep the bird in the air.
Pilikun is an iPhone game with one move. Shake hard enough and the bird flies while the music plays. Ease off and it starts to fall, and three seconds later the round is over.
Watch one round on a real iPhone.
A 3-2-1 countdown, fifteen seconds in the air, then the fall. Turn the sound on: the music is half the game.
A screen recording from an iPhone with the game's sound, October 2024. The build is a little older than the one in the App Store: its result screen said Best Time, where the current one shows a trophy.
Shake harder every ten seconds.
The game averages the phone's acceleration over its last 50 readings. At first it asks for 2 g, and for every 10 seconds the bird stays up it asks for 1 g more, up to 11 g.
The clock counts only while the bird is in the air. Your best time stays on the phone and goes to the Game Center leaderboard.
Pilikun started as a vibration game. In the June 2024 builds one buzz meant shake and two meant freeze, and in July I added fake buzzes to catch you moving. In September I rebuilt it around one rule, shake to stay up, and gave the signals to sound. I don't remember exactly why the vibration went. Probably a buzz is hard to feel in a hand that is already shaking a phone.
Turn your phone into an 8-bit synth.
Beep-Boop is the second mode. Shake the phone and it plays a square wave: the harder you shake, the higher the note. It has no score and never ends.
1.00 g
silent
Shake your phone.
Shake the mouse. Here a faster move stands in for a harder shake.
The numbers are the app's: silence below 1.3 g, then a note that climbs from 200 Hz at 0.3 g to 1,000 Hz at 6 g.
The screen changes colour with every shake, so before the first Beep-Boop the game warns about epilepsy. On this page the colour holds still if your system asks for reduced motion.
Challenge a friend, and whoever drops first loses.
Online Multiplayer finds you an opponent through Game Center. Both phones count down 3-2-1, then each of you shakes your own phone by the same rules.
- The phones send each other only a few flags: start, I lost, rematch.
- The first phone to drop tells the other one, and that one shows You Won!
- Retry asks the opponent for a rematch and waits 30 seconds for an answer.
- If someone disconnects, the player who stayed wins.
You Lost!
You Won!
Poke the bird.
I made Pilikun in Spline. The app plays the bird as rendered video, and the live scene lives on here.
In October 2024 I took the live 3D scene out of the app. The commit message only says that I switched to video and it's good.
