Lingo

[ctrl-alt-del]

Hello again all of you!

This time I have a load of questions, some of which might seem simpole, some of which might be far more difficult then I can even comprehend.

To start off, I'm a novice to programming. I've made some simple games and programs as excercises and they all work as intended so I'm not that much of a novice.
This time though, I'd like to make a game called Lingo. It's a game in which you have to guess a 6 letter word, you say a word like "postal" and it will then tell you which characters are in the word but in the wrong place and which characters are in the right place, you get 6 turns to try and guess the word. It's sort of a combination between Hangman and Mastermind.

For this I need several things, most of which I don't have a clue about and which I will look in to. My request therefore is that you answer that which you feel could use a bit of help, and that you ignore the rest or give me a name so I can search that for myself.

As I am still in the planning-phase of this program I only know about certain problems at this point, so more could be added soon (I have a lot of free time at the moment due to my exams at school)

First thing is the automatic changing of the textbox. The way I want to set it up is 6 textboxes in a row, and 6 rows down. After the user inputs a single character it should jump to the next textbox in the row. But how do I achieve this?
(sidenote: I like doing as much as I can dynamically, so if there is any way to instantiate a new row after the previous is checked, that would be awesome!)

I'd also like to start using System.Drawing for this project, but I have zero experience with that. On the visual front of this game I'd like the following:
Blue squares around the transparent textboxes. They should turn orange when the character is in the right place, and should create a yellow circle around the character when the character exists in the word but is in the wrong spot

For a ling to how the show looks check this youtube-link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmweqiL-ZGc
(This is a special episode, so for any who can understand the Dutch in there, this is not normally how it works! ;) )

And last but not least for now, I'd like to use a simple textfile so it dynamically loads the words it can use. Any filetype is good, but again, I have never worked with this so I have no clue what to do or what to check for.

Any help would be immensly appreciated, and thank you at least for reading this far.

[ddanbe]

Blue squares around the transparent textboxes. They should turn orange when the character is in the right place, and should create a yellow circle around the character when the character exists in the word but is in the wrong spot

A textbox has a BackColor property. I would first concentrate on the logic of the game, see that it works. Later you could derive a class from texbox which can do things like drawing something in the background. For now I would use MyTextBox.BackColor = Color.Yellow; instead of using a yellow circle.
Keep it simple in the beginning! I know guys who would concentrate on the fact of which color looked the most appealing in their app and forgot all about what it was supposed to do!
Search this site with the keywords array, textbox and sudoku to find out how to manipulate textboxes in your code.

[ctrl-alt-del]

Thanks for the reply.

So far I've played around with StreamWriter and StreamReader and progress is good. I don't have full control over it yet, but that is only a matter of combining different parts of programming. At least I have something working that can read and write to files.

The visual part of the program is the last part as far as I'm concerned. First I want to have the rest of the program ready.

At the moment I would really like to know how to make it autojump to the next textbox though. Any help or direction there?

Thanks in advance.

[ddanbe]

Set the ActiveControl property of your form to the control you want to accept input. This control now has the Focus.
Like: MyForm.ActiveControl = MyTextboxNr3;