The game was created as a project for the course "Diploma in Software Development at Code Institute" in 2022. The requirement was to create an iteractive pure Terminal Python app deployed on a front end website. The game is a space shooter with a simple storyline. A space pilot who has to defend Earth from enemy ships. He can move his ship in all directions and shoot at the enemy ships. The game ends when the player loses all his lives. The best score is saved in a database and displayed on the website.
Visit and play the live version of the game here
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Game goal: Defend Earth from enemy ships
- Player can move his ship in all directions
- Can shoot at enemy ships
- Best seven scores are saved in a database
- Lives and score are displayed on the screen
- Game ends when player loses all his lives
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User goals
- Shoot at enemy ships
- Do not let the eneny pass
The technologies used in this project were the following:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Python
The diagram below show the main classes and interactions between them. Scene is the main class, it contains all data to be used and updated during the game and the methods to update the data. The screen data is updated during the game but just rendered once in the "run_game" function. The game is rendered in the terminal using the "curtsies" library https://github.com/bpython/curtsies. The library was required to both render the game without blinking, but also to receive input from any pressed key. Beside the "curtsies" library, the game uses the "random" library to generate random numbers, the "time" library to set the game speed and the gspread and oauth2client libraries to connect to the Google Sheets database. The game is deployed on Heroku and the database is hosted on Google Sheets.
When the user opens the website, the page is displayed with the game title, the game description, rules and a message to press the start button to start the game.
The menu is displayed in the terminal. The user can navigate through the menu with the arrow keys and press Enter key to select an option.
Once the user selects the start option, the game starts.
The user can select the records option to see the best seven scores saved in the database.
When the user selects the about option, a window with the game autor and version is displayed.
The game is played on a 114x34 terminal screen. There are three enemy ships that move in random directions.
Main ship:
Alien ships in the order of strength 0 - 4:
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The ship lives are got from the equation: (type_ship + 1) * 2. For example, the ship 0 has live 2. The ship 4 has lives 9.
New enemies and movement rules can be easilly added to the game.
The manual testing was done by playing the game and checking the functionality of the game and printing necessary information on the terminal screen. The code is tested with the PEP8 pylint extension in VS Code. To pass the pylint test, the code had to be refactored to meet the pylint requirements. The pylint score is 10/10.
- After playing for a while the game starts to slow down. I could not find why it is slowing down. In the proccess, using debug, I found one error that was also affecting speed.
On the image bellow is possible to see that I was adding a new enemy ship to the list of enemies. I was appending twice, resulting in a None being added to the list and never deleted. I fixed the bug, but the game id still slowing down.
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I have tried both cProfile and memory profiler, but I cound not find it.
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The game is not responsive to the terminal window size. It was designed to be played on a 90x30 terminal window. If the window is smaller, the game is not displayed correctly. If the window is bigger, it can get slow.
There are few ideas left to be implemented:
- Make enemies shoot at the player
- Add random power ups to change the player gun or add extra lives
- Add a boss enemy
- Add a level system
- Make better enemies movement
- The game was deployed on Heroku. The code is stored in a GitHub repository. The repository is connected to Heroku and the deployment is automatic.
- curtsies example and documentation: without understanding the curtsies library, the game would not be possible.
- The slack community for the support and help.
- This game development was a fun process, but also a challenge. I learned different technologies and libraries to make it work. When I had the idea of the game, I knew it was a challange, but I wanted to keep the original idea. I could not implement the gun styles and the power ups, but I am happy with the result. I am looking forward to implement the ideas I have left.
- Curtsies example and documentation: without understanding the curtsies library, the game would not be possible.
- Rick Van Hatten, for the book Mastering Python and which I used as a reference for better development practices.