That Flappy Bird game looked so simple I tried to see how fast I can recreate it. This took 4 or 5 days, playable but a lot left out, like sounds and fancy scene/collision management. Instead I just built it adhoc style all in MainWindow (only 5 methods needed) along with 3 very simple classes to hold geometries (XBPoint, XBRay, XBGap (the pipes)). Also my OpenGL framework and images pulled from the Happy Flappy Bird clone https://github.com/Hipo/happy-flappy-bird .

Maybe you build Flappy Bird too. It's the 101 of physics games: 1 input, a block, an array of blocks, floor, gravity, collision and drawing. How much and long can that take?

http://home.comcast.net/~trochoid/code/XoppyBird.zip press up to go, down to reset. ymmv

Really cool. Consider yourself beaten Paul, got 34 ;)
Update: Aaaaand I WON! :D

@Alwyn B Great game... well done!

Just one thing, to get it to run on Windows, you need to enable "Use GDI Plus" in the Windows build settings.

Why is this defaulted to OFF (disabled) ?

With RS2012 I ran into an error on EZfont.NewFormattedPic:
On the first line: PlatformNotSupportedException

@Alwyn B I also think GDI Plus should be ON by default.

I've updated all my project templates with GDI+ true so my future posts shouldn't have this problem :)

@Mathias M With RS2012 I ran into an error on EZfont.NewFormattedPic:
On the first line: PlatformNotSupportedException

That first line creates an alpha style Picture which isn't supported for all platforms (I think only Carbon isn't). Instead you'll need to create a mask style Picture by simply adding ", 32".

dim p As new Picture(width, height, 32)

I'll see what I can do to update my code.

@S A On Windows 8.1 the images are not visible. Its kind of very faint background.

I'm not sure. Is this the GDI+ issue? Or maybe its a graphics card thing my OpenGL code doesn't account for. I work only on Mac and don't have a way to investigate or know about Windows and Linux differences. If there was a crash I could guess but otherwise I can't think of what's wrong :(