It came from outer space!

In the not too distant future I'll be helping to give a talk on pygame, a set of modules for the scripting language Python that allows you develop simplistic games. 2D platformers would be a good example.

Unfortunately it has been a very long time since I worked with pygame. So to get myself up to speed I decided to recreate Space Invaders.



Overall it has been a great learning experience. One of the pieces of advice I took on board when starting this project was to "do the whole thing". It doesn't sound particularly revolutionary but you'd be surprised how many times people, myself included, stop as soon as they have one aspect completed. Creating a game isn't about stopping when you have your character moving about, instead you need to think about menus, sound effects, the user interface, all the things that make up a game.

I'm fairly happy with the result but its a bit sad that I won't have time to continue it any further as I'm quite busy in the near future. There's still a fair bit missing, a high score table would have been nice. There's also a few issues that will need to be resolved. The lightning red UFO will definitely need to be slowed down before people can actually shoot it.



I'll post the slides for the talk here once we have finished them. In the meantime I'll close by saying that Pygame is a wonderful tool, if you want to learn about programming games or would just like to learn about Python itself, this is a great place to start.

The game itself is available here. Just keep in mind that you will need Python 2.6 and Pygame installed on your machine before you can use it. Once this has been done, just run main.py and enjoy!