Can You Make a Game in Microsoft Paint?
We’ve all made games on Godot and Unity, and when we were young, we’ve all played around with Scratch. But have you ever tried using Microsoft Paint to make a game?
Youtuber Code Bullet took this challenge up with his video, “I made FLAPPY BIRD in DUMB programs”, and one of the applications was Microsoft paint. He wanted to make a functional game that could be played with his arrow keys.
Since Microsoft Paint can’t really be controlled with keyboard input, Code Bullet made a Python command that takes in keyboard input, and converted it to a series of mouse movements that meticulously drew out all the components to flappy bird.
The game would run on around 4 fps, and for each frame, the Python command would tell the cursor to click on the color yellow, draw the bird, click on the color green, draw the 2 pipes, and then clear the screen for the next frame. And this cycle would repeat infinitely, to get the idea of a game loop.
And adding keyboard input of the up and down arrow keys, it would adjust the mouses’ positioning so that the bird would be drawn lower or higher, depending on what Code Bullet does with the keyboard.
The game actually worked after a bit of testing, except for some inevitable problems, like the mouse occasionally missing parts of the drawing, such as accidentally drawing a triangle instead of a rectangle. And apart from the game running really slowly at around 4 fps, everything functioned, and Code Bullet successfully made a game, technically with Microsoft Paint!
He also tried many other applications like the File Explorer, and many other actually dumb programs.