Learn C# by Making a Flappy Bird Game in Windows Forms & VS

In this part of the lecture we will start the project in visual studio. Before we start make sure you have downloaded the files attached to this video and extracted it somewhere you can find it. This zipped folder contains the images, icons, sound files and text files required by the game.

During this lecture we will explore how to create suitable UI's for a small game. User interface or UI is a vital part of app and games development. They assist the end user to find what they need and offer further help when they are unsure. We will create a simple UI and a help screen for the users of this game.

In this UI screen we will allow the users to change the bird image and pipe image by clicking on them. There will be two buttons on the form.  1 button will open the game screen and another will open the help window. In the help window we will simply put some instructions on how to play the game and add an animated gif of the game being played.

For this part we will need to load and read the content of the high score text file for the title screen. We want the high score value to be updated on both of the game screen and the title screen.

In this part of the game we will be creating the game window. Here the player will control the flappy bird using the space bar. The pipes will be spawned in the game and moved towards the player. Player will manage to fly between the pipe gaps to score and wait for the next challenging pipes to appear. The pipes will be spawning in different positions so its challenging for the player. We will add different sound effect for the player jump and hit movements. Players will be able to play with the bird and pipe image they picked from the first screen. We will add all of the components from picture boxes, labels, panels and timers for this window. We will code all of the components properly using C# programming.

In this part of the tutorial we will be building the application to two different types of EXE files.

In the first method we will create a set up wizard. This is where you can include all of the application files, desk top shortcut and start menu shortcut all in one MSI file. When you open this file it will show a step by step installation screen. After the installation it will copy the files from the set up and place them in the hard drive along with a desktop shortcut with customized icon.

In the second method we will create a single EXE file that players can download with the game assets and play the game without installing the game first. This exe file will contain all of the DLL libraries for .NET for it will be a self executing file without needing to have .net installed on the system.

Lastly in this tutorial as promised we will show you how to add more graphics to the game thats already been built. If you build the game where it can read specific files from a folder, then even after its been built you can continue to add content to it. For example in this one we have 3 animated player images in the extras folder and also we have several pipe images. All of then can be placed in the assets folder and you see the way we programmed the game it will load and place all of the new images inside of the game without needing to code anything for it. its pretty awesome.