🐤 Flappy Bird – Full PyGame Clone

This is a complete Flappy Bird game I built in 7th class while learning Python and PyGame. It includes smooth animations, a welcome screen, moving pipes, sound effects, score counting, collision detection, and a full game loop — just like the real Flappy Bird.

This project helped me understand how video games handle physics, movement, events, and rendering.

Demo

2025-12-08.19-20-40.mp4

Features

• Fully functional welcome/start screen
• Gravity-based bird movement
• Flap mechanic with smooth vertical acceleration
• Randomly generated pipes
• Collision detection with top pipes, bottom pipes, and ground
• Scoreboard using digit sprites
• Moving base/ground
• Sound effects: wing, point, hit, die, swoosh
• Clean game loop with sprite rendering
• Auto pipe recycling to keep the game infinite
• Background image + sprite graphics
• Simple but accurate physics
• Organized pipe generation using helper functions

How It Works

• When the game starts, the welcome screen is shown with the background, bird, and message.
• When the player presses SPACE or the UP arrow, the main game starts.
• The bird continuously falls due to gravity. When you press SPACE, it flaps upward.
• Pipes are generated at random heights using the getRandomPipe() function.
• These pipes move left across the screen to create obstacles.
• Every time the bird crosses a pipe safely, the score increases.
• If the bird hits a pipe or touches the ground/sky, the game ends and returns to the welcome screen.
• The screen is redrawn every frame to show background, pipes, ground, player, and score.
• Sounds are played at the correct events (wing, point, hit, etc.).

Installation

Install PyGame:

  pip install pygame

Your project folder should look like this:

project-folder/
│ main.py
│
├── gallery/
│   ├── sprites/
│   │   bird.png
│   │   background.png
│   │   pipe.png
│   │   message.png
│   │   base.png
│   │   0.png … 9.png
│   │
│   └── audio/
│       wing.wav
│       point.wav
│       hit.wav
│       die.wav
│       swoosh.wav

Make sure your folder contains:

• A folder named Images
• A folder named Sound
• All .png images and .wav/.mp3 files used by the game
• Make sure all the file paths match the names used in the code.

Deployment

Run the python file:

  python main.py

Replace main.py with your file’s actual name. The game will open in a PyGame window. Press SPACE or UP to start playing.

Tech Stack

• Python 3
• PyGame
• Sprite rendering
• Basic 2D animation
• Physics simulation (gravity, upward velocity)
• Game loops & frame updates
• Collision detection
• Randomized obstacle generation
• Sound integration

Lessons Learned

• How to detect keyboard input events
• How to load sprites, sounds, and handle transparency
• How to create gravity + flap physics for the bird
• How to generate pipes at random heights using math
• How to detect collisions between rectangles
• How to update display elements such as score digits
• How to structure a game into functions (welcome screen, main game, pipe generator, collision detector)

Future Improvements

• Add a leaderboard or high-score save system
• Add animated bird flapping frames
• Add difficulty levels
• Add multiple themes/backgrounds
• Add a pause menu
• Add mobile controls (touch input)
• Export to executable or web version

Credits

This project was inspired by the official Flappy Bird mechanics and built with help from Python + PyGame tutorials I followed in 7th class. All code, game logic, and structuring were written by me