Finally making games!

I'm learning to python and pygame at the moment. This page will document my experiences! I should've started earlier, really.

Breakout Clone

After spending about a week with pygame after work, I tried making a little breakout clone to see if I could. I got the basic skeleton working in about an hour and a half. Maybe that's a long time; whatever; it worked.

The actual game can be cloned here .

Some screenshots:

You'll find the music for it on this very website. Put it in a 'music' folder in the top level folder.

You will need python and pygame to run it. It's still very basic. :)

Python-Python

Clone it here!

Also known as... snake. This is written in python, and is another 'write it to see if you can' thing. As with the breakout clone, I didn't allow myself to look at anybody else's solution while making this. I loved snake as a kid, so I really wanted to know if I'd be able to write it, since then I'd feel like some kind of legendary superhero or something.

Turns out I can!

My first implementation was pretty bad; when the snake ate food, a segment would be added, instead of just not removed. So the snake could theoretically hit itself while playing, and it also looked messy, as the new segment sometimes briefly 'floated' behind the snake. I've since tidied it.

Early on, I hit a weird bug where the snake would stop being responsive after a while; it would ignore the player and just crash into a wall. Eventually I realised this was because certain keypresses (KEYDOWNS at the time) were not being handled, so were filling the queue. So I fixed this by handling those.

The second issue I hit was that the snake felt... clunky. This was because it was changing direction based on KEYUP events, whereas as a player you expect the snake to change direction the instant you *press* the key, not the instant you release it. So that was a pretty simple fix; I started listening for KEYDOWNS instead, and discarded the KEYUPS so they wouldn't get in the way.

So, this took a few hours of development to be free of game-destroying bugs. A little after I got the basic thing working, I jazzed it up a bit, with some retro faux 3D. On top of each shape, I drew a smaller, lighter coloured shape, and pinned it at the same top_left coordinate. This gives the (deeply unconvincing) illusion of a lightsource to the top left. I repeated this a couple of times per shape, to soften it a bit.

As with the breakout clone, there's an example backing track on this site.

Misc

There are some things I've made that don't quite count as 'games', but I don't know a better place to list them.

Badpaint is a 'drawing' application, using python and pygame. If you have the misfortune of using it, feel free to submit any masterpieces you create to the 'gallery' in the repo. :) I liked the idea of making (and better, using!) something like this in the present day. And it will even work with top-of-the-range graphics tablets.

Finally, this is the beginning of a space-invaders clone. There's nothing interesting about it yet. It's (just about) playable, so I thought I might as well make it open.

Just one example of the sort of thing you can create in Badpaint!