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The idea came after we dug deeper than “You play as the pipe from flappy bird”. Turning the game into the ultimate shitpost. And the mechanic of playing flappy bird to lock dialog options is from those tiktok family guy subway surgery videos lmao.

What Fumple said, plus I really think a "Flappy Bird dating sim" led to a slew of ideas, like the top/bottom pipes being your gender, a school of apps, how the ending would play out, tons of puns, etc. What I find interesting is most of the ideas we made (and axed) for alternative games were made by other jammers, like a gun-in-a-dungeon game, and funny enough the slew of flappy bird, but you're the pipe, games. ALSO, as EST folk, we didn't have much time after work, so Friday was really an idea day, with the remaining Saturday and Sunday morning to finish up. Lesson learned, take your time to come up with interesting ideas. Find out which idea basically forms the mechanics, story, fun on its own (the flappy bird dating sim had the most bullet points/worked with our team dynamics).

Adding my perspective to Fumple and Manny; basically, we were all in a call slamming down tons of ideas, and someone threw out Flappy Bird. I immediately was like "Oh god no, basically every iteration of Flappy Bird has been done already ... other than like, a dating sim ig." It was an out-of-pocket remark, but people started joking about it.  People in-call kept throwing out hilarious joke after hilarious joke, so as the writer I thought, "This idea has a lot of content to work with -- could actually work as a memey VN." I do remember thinking "How does this fit the theme?" realized the reversal of Flappy Bird could be "You want to hit the pipe" ->"You want to ram the pipe" and the idea suddenly didn't seem too silly.
Still, we kept 3 other ideas, ever endeared to this game the more we talked, but it was when our artist joined the call and sent some concepts that we decided to full-send. Once Buff Flappy concept was sent, it was a done deal LOL. 

Also so happy to hear you really enjoyed this! Thanks so much!