Schlagwort: Python

Punch and kick your way through a rabble of bad dudes in a simple scrolling beat-’em-up. Mark Vanstone shows you how

Although released to tie in with Jackie Chan’s Spartan X, Kung-Fu Master was originally inspired by the Bruce Lee film, Game of Death.

Kung-Fu Master

Kung-Fu Master hit arcades in 1984. Its side-scrolling action, punching and kicking through an army of knife-throwing goons, helped create the beat-’em-up genre. In fact, its designer, Takashi Nishiyama, would go on to kickstart the Street Fighter series at Capcom, and later start up the Fatal Fury franchise at SNK.

In true eighties arcade style, Kung-Fu Master distils the elements of a chop-socky action film to its essentials. Hero Thomas and his girlfriend are attacked, she’s kidnapped, and Thomas fights his way through successive levels of bad guys to rescue her. The screen scrolls from side to side, and Thomas must use his kicks and punches to get from one side of the level to the other and climb the stairs to the next floor of the building.

Our Kung-Fu Master homage features punches, kicks, and a host of goons to use them on.

Making our brawler

To recreate this classic with Pygame Zero, we’ll need quite a few frames of animation, both for the hero character and the enemies he’ll battle. For a reasonable walk cycle, we’ll need at least six frames in each direction. Any fewer than six won’t look convincing, but more frames can achieve a smoother effect. For this example, I’ve used the 3D package Poser, since it has a handy walk designer which makes generating sequences of animation much easier.

Once we have the animation frames for our characters, including a punch, kick, and any others you want to add, we need a background for the characters to walk along. The image we’re using is 2000×400 pixels, and we start the game by displaying the central part so our hero can walk either way. By detecting arrow key presses, the hero can ‘walk’ one way or the other by moving the background left and right, while cycling through the walk animation frames. Then if we detect a Q key press, we change the action string to kick; if it’s A, it’s punch. Then in our update() function, we use that action to set the Actor’s image to the indicated action frame.

Our enemy Actors will constantly walk towards the centre of the screen, and we can cycle through their walking frames the same way we do with the main hero. To give kicks and punches an effect, we put in collision checks. If the hero strikes while an enemy collides with him, we register a hit. This could be made more precise to require more skill, but once a strike’s registered, we can switch the enemy to a different status that will cause them to fall downwards and off the screen.

This sample is a starting point to demonstrate the basics of the beat-’em-up genre. With the addition of flying daggers, several levels, and a variety of bad guys, you’ll be on your way to creating a Pygame Zero version of this classic game.

The generation game

Because we’re moving the background when our hero walks left and right, we need to make sure we move our enemies with the background, otherwise they’ll look as though they’re sliding in mid-air – this also applies to any other objects that aren’t part of the background. The number of enemies can be governed in several ways: in our code, we just have a random number deciding if a new enemy will appear during each update, but we could use a predefined pattern for the enemy generation to make it a bit less random, or we use a combination of patterns and random numbers.

Here’s Mark’s code snippet, which creates a side-scrolling beat-’em-up in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

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Look how lovely and glowy it is.

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Learn how to create the turn-based combat system found in games like Pokémon, Final Fantasy, and Undertale. Raspberry Pi’s Rik Cross shows you how.

With their emphasis on trading and collecting as well as turn-based combat, the Pokémon games helped bring RPG concepts to the masses.

In the late 1970s, high school student Richard Garriott made a little game called Akalabeth. Programmed in Applesoft BASIC, it helped set the template for the role-playing genre on computers. Even today, turn-based combat is still a common sight in games, with this autumn’s Pokémon Sword and Shield revolving around a battle system which sees opponents take turns to plan and execute attacks or defensive moves.

The turn-based combat system in this article is text-only, and works by allowing players to choose to defend against or attack their opponent in turn. The battle ends when only one player has some health remaining.

Each Player taking part in the battle is added to the static players list as it’s created. Players have a name, a health value (initially set to 100) and a Boolean defending value (initially set to False) to indicate whether a player is using their shield. Players also have an inputmethod attribute, which is the function used for getting player input for making various choices in the game. This function is passed to the object when created, and means that we can have human players that give their input through the keyboard, as well as computer players that make choices (in our case simply by making a random choice between the available options).

Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth laid the groundwork for Ultima, and was one of the earliest CRPGs.

A base Action class specifies an action owner and an opponent, as well as an execute() method which has no effect on the game. Subclasses of the base class override this execute() method to specify the effect the action has on the owner and/or the opponent of the action. As a basic example, two actions have been created: Defend, which sets the owner’s defending attribute to True, and Attack, which sets the owner’s defending attribute to False, and lowers the opponent’s health by a random amount depending on whether or not they are defending.

Players take turns to choose a single action to perform in the battle, starting with the human ‘Hero’ player. The choose_action() method is used to decide what to do next (in this case either attack or defend), as well as an opponent if the player has chosen to attack. A player can only be selected as an opponent if they have a health value greater than 0, and are therefore still in the game. This choose_action() method returns an Action, which is then executed using its execute() method. A few time.sleep() commands have also been thrown in here  to ramp up the suspense!

After each player has had their turn, a check is done to make sure that at least two players still have a health value greater than 0, and therefore that the battle can continue. If so, the static get_next_player() method finds the next player still in the game to take their turn in the battle, otherwise, the game ends and the winner is announced.

Our example battle can be easily extended in lots of interesting ways. The AI for choosing an action could also be made more sophisticated, by looking at opponents’ health or defending attributes before choosing an action. You could also give each action a ‘cost’, and give players a number of action ‘points’ per turn. Chosen actions would be added to a list, until all of the points have been used. These actions would then be executed one after the other, before moving on to the next player’s turn.

Here’s Rik’s code, which gets a simple turn-based combat system running in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

You can read more features like this one in Wireframe issue 28, available now at Tesco, WHSmith, all good independent UK newsagents, and the Raspberry Pi Store, Cambridge.

Or you can buy Wireframe directly from Raspberry Pi Press — delivery is available worldwide. And if you’d like a handy digital version of the magazine, you can also download issue 28 for free in PDF format.

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Guide a frog across busy roads and rivers. Mark Vanstone shows you how to code a simple remake of Konami’s arcade game, Frogger.

Konami’s original Frogger: so iconic, it even featured in a 1998 episode of Seinfeld.

Frogger

Why did the frog cross the road? Because Frogger would be a pretty boring game if it didn’t. Released in 1981 by Konami, the game appeared in assorted bars, sports halls, and arcades across the world, and became an instant hit. The concept was simple: players used the joystick to move a succession of frogs from the bottom of the screen to the top, avoiding a variety of hazards – cars, lorries, and later, the occasional crocodile. Each frog had to be safely manoeuvred to one of five alcoves within a time limit, while extra points were awarded for eating flies along the way.

Before Frogger, Konami mainly focused on churning out clones of other hit arcade games like Space Invaders and Breakout; Frogger was one of its earliest original ideas, and the simplicity of its concept saw it ported to just about every home system available at the time. (Ironically, Konami’s game would fall victim to repeated cloning by other developers.) Decades later, developers still take inspiration from it; Hipster Whale’s Crossy Road turned Frogger into an endless running game; earlier this year, Konami returned to the creative well with Frogger in Toy Town, released on Apple Arcade.

Code your own Konami Frogger

We can recreate much of Frogger’s gameplay in just a few lines of Pygame Zero code. The key elements are the frog’s movement, which use the arrow keys, vehicles that move across the screen, and floating objects – logs and turtles – moving in opposite directions. Our background graphic will provide the road, river, and grass for our frog to move over. The frog’s movement will be triggered from an on_key_down() function, and as the frog moves, we switch to a second frame with legs outstretched, reverting back to a sitting position after a short delay. We can use the inbuilt Actor properties to change the image and set the angle of rotation.

In our Frogger homage, we move the frog with the arrow keys to avoid the traffic, and jump onto the floating logs and turtles.

For all the other moving elements, we can also use Pygame Zero Actors; we just need to make an array for our cars with different graphics for the various rows, and an array for our floating objects in the same way.
In our update() function, we need to move each Actor according to which row it’s in, and when an Actor disappears off the screen, set the x coordinate so that it reappears on the opposite side.

Handling the logic of the frog moving across the road is quite easy; we just check for collision with each of the cars, and if the frog hits a car, then we have a squashed frog. The river crossing is a little more complicated. Each time the frog moves on the river, we need to make sure that it’s on a floating Actor. We therefore check to make sure that the frog is in collision with one of the floating elements, otherwise it’s game over.

There are lots of other elements you could add to the example shown here: the original arcade game provided several frogs to guide to their alcoves on the other side of the river, while crocodiles also popped up from time to time to add a bit more danger. Pygame Zero has all the tools you need to make a fully functional version of Konami’s hit.

Here’s Mark’s code, which gets a Frogger homage running in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

Get your copy of Wireframe issue 27

You can read more features like this one in Wireframe issue 27, available now at Tesco, WHSmith, all good independent UK newsagents, and the Raspberry Pi Store, Cambridge.

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It was one of gaming’s first boss battles. Mark Vanstone shows you how to recreate the mothership from the 1980 arcade game, Phoenix.

Phoenix’s fifth stage offered a unique challenge in 1980: one of gaming’s first-ever boss battles.

First released in 1980, Phoenix was something of an arcade pioneer. The game was the kind of post-Space Invaders fixed-screen shooter that was ubiquitous at the time: players moved their ship from side to side, shooting at a variety of alien birds of different sizes and attack patterns. The enemies moved swiftly, and the player’s only defence was a temporary shield which could be activated when the birds swooped and strafed the lone defender. But besides all that, Phoenix had a few new ideas of its own: not only did it offer five distinct stages, but it also featured one of the earliest examples of a boss battle – its heavily armoured alien mothership, which required accurate shots to its shields before its weak spot could be exposed.

To recreate Phoenix’s boss, all we need is Pygame Zero. We can get a portrait style window with the WIDTH and HEIGHT variables and throw in some parallax stars (an improvement on the original’s static backdrop) with some blitting in the draw() function. The parallax effect is created by having a static background of stars with a second (repeated) layer of stars moving down the screen.

The mothership itself is made up of several Actor objects which move together down the screen towards the player’s spacecraft, which can be moved right and left using the mouse. There’s the main body of the mothership, in the centre is the alien that we want to shoot, and then we have two sets of moving shields.

Like the original Phoenix, our mothership boss battle has multiple shields that need to be taken out to expose the alien at the core.

In this example, rather than have all the graphics dimensions in multiples of eight (as we always did in the old days), we will make all our shield blocks 20 by 20 pixels, because computers simply don’t need to work in multiples of eight any more. The first set of shields is the purple rotating bar around the middle of the ship. This is made up of 14 Actor blocks which shift one place to the right each time they move. Every other block has a couple of portal windows which makes the rotation obvious, and when a block moves off the right-hand side, it is placed on the far left of the bar.

The second set of shields are in three yellow rows (you may want to add more), the first with 14 blocks, the second with ten blocks, and the last with four. These shield blocks are fixed in place but share a behaviour with the purple bar shields, in that when they are hit by a bullet, they change to a damaged version. There are four levels of damage before they are destroyed and the bullets can pass through. When enough shields have been destroyed for a bullet to reach the alien, the mothership is destroyed (in this version, the alien flashes).

Bullets can be fired by clicking the mouse button. Again, the original game had alien birds flying around the mothership and dive-bombing the player, making it harder to get a good shot in, but this is something you could try adding to the code yourself.

To really bring home that eighties Phoenix arcade experience, you could also add in some atmospheric shooting effects and, to round the whole thing off, have an 8-bit rendition of Beethoven’s Für Elise playing in the background.

Here’s Mark’s code, which gets a simple mothership battle running in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

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You can read more features like this one in Wireframe issue 26, available now at Tesco, WHSmith, all good independent UK newsagents, and the Raspberry Pi Store, Cambridge.

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Raspberry Pi’s own Rik Cross shows you how to code your own Columns-style tile-matching puzzle game in Python and Pygame Zero.

Created by Hewlett-Packard engineer Jay Geertsen, Columns was Sega’s sparkly rival to Nintendo’s all-conquering Tetris.

Columns and tile-matching

Tile-matching games began with Tetris in 1984 and the less famous Chain Shot! the following year. The genre gradually evolved through games like Dr. Mario, Columns, Puyo Puyo, and Candy Crush Saga. Although their mechanics differ, the goals are the same: to organise a board of different-coloured tiles by moving them around until they match.

Here, I’ll show how you can create a simple tile-matching game using Python and Pygame. In it, any tile can be swapped with the tile to its right, with the aim being to make matches of three or more tiles of the same colour. Making a match causes the tiles to disappear from the board, with tiles dropping down to fill in the gaps.

At the start of a new game, a board of randomly generated tiles is created. This is made as an (initially empty) two-dimensional array, whose size is determined by the values of rows and columns. A specific tile on the board is referenced by its row and column number.

We want to start with a truly random board, but we also want to avoid having any matching tiles. Random tiles are added to each board position, therefore, but replaced if a tile is the same as the one above or to it’s left (if such a tile exists).

Our board consists of 12 rows and 8 columns of tiles. Pressing SPACE will swap the 2 selected tiles (outlined in white), and in this case, create a match of red tiles vertically.

In our game, two tiles are ‘selected’ at any one time, with the player pressing the arrow keys to change those tiles. A selected variable keeps track of the row and column of the left-most selected tile, with the other tile being one column to the right of the left-most tile. Pressing SPACE swaps the two selected tiles, checks for matches, clears any matched tiles, and fills any gaps with new tiles.

A basic ‘match-three’ algorithm would simply check whether any tiles on the board have a matching colour tile on either side, horizontally or vertically. I’ve opted for something a little more convoluted, though, as it allows us to check for matches on any length, as well as track multiple, separate matches. A currentmatch list keeps track of the (x,y) positions of a set of matching tiles. Whenever this list is empty, the next tile to check is added to the list, and this process is repeated until the next tile is a different colour.

If the currentmatch list contains three or more tiles at this point, then the list is added to the overall matches list (a list of lists of matches!) and the currentmatch list is reset. To clear matched tiles, the matched tile positions are set to None, which indicates the absence of a tile at that position. To fill the board, tiles in each column are moved down by one row whenever an empty board position is found, with a new tile being added to the top row of the board.

The code provided here is just a starting point, and there are lots of ways to develop the game, including adding a scoring system and animation to liven up your tiles.

Here’s Rik’s code, which gets a simple tile-match game running in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

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Replicate the physics of barrel rolling – straight out of the classic Donkey Kong. Mark Vanstone shows you how.

Released in 1981, Donkey Kong was one of the most important games in Nintendo’s history.

Nintendo’s Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong first appeared in arcades in 1981, and starred not only the titular angry ape, but also a bouncing, climbing character called Jumpman – who later went on to star in Nintendo’s little-known series of Super Mario games. Donkey Kong featured four screens per level, and the goal in each was to avoid obstacles and guide Mario (sorry, Jumpman) to the top of the screen to rescue the hapless Pauline. Partly because the game was so ferociously difficult from the beginning, Donkey Kong’s first screen is arguably the most recognisable today: Kong lobs an endless stream of barrels, which roll down a network of crooked girders and threaten to knock Jumpman flat.

Barrels in Pygame Zero

Donkey Kong may have been a relentlessly tough game, but we can recreate one of its most recognisable elements with relative ease. We can get a bit of code running with Pygame Zero – and a couple of functions borrowed from Pygame – to make barrels react to the platforms they’re on, roll down in the direction of a slope, and fall off the end onto the next platform. It’s a very simple physics simulation using an invisible bitmap to test where the platforms are and which way they’re sloping. We also have some ladders which the barrels randomly either roll past or sometimes use to descend to the next platform below.

Our Donkey Kong tribute up and running in Pygame Zero. The barrels roll down the platforms and sometimes the ladders.

Once we’ve created a barrel as an Actor, the code does three tests for its platform position on each update: one to the bottom-left of the barrel, one bottom-centre, and one bottom-right. It samples three pixels and calculates how much red is in those pixels. That tells us how much platform is under the barrel in each position. If the platform is tilted right, the number will be higher on the left, and the barrel must move to the right. If tilted left, the number will be higher on the right, and the barrel must move left. If there is no red under the centre point, the barrel is in the air and must fall downward.

There are just three frames of animation for the barrel rolling (you could add more for a smoother look): for rolling right, we increase the frame number stored with the barrel Actor; for rolling to the left, we decrease the frame number; and if the barrel’s going down a ladder, we use the front-facing images for the animation. The movement down a ladder is triggered by another test for the blue component of a pixel below the barrel. The code then chooses randomly whether to send the barrel down the ladder.

The whole routine will keep producing more barrels and moving them down the platforms until they reach the bottom. Again, this is a very simple physics system, but it demonstrates how those rolling barrels can be recreated in just a few lines of code. All we need now is a jumping player character (which could use the same invisible map to navigate up the screen) and a big ape to sit at the top throwing barrels, then you’ll have the makings of your own fully featured Donkey Kong tribute.

Here’s Mark’s code, which sets some Donkey Kong Barrels rolling about in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

Get your copy of Wireframe issue 24

You can read more features like this one in Wireframe issue 24, available now at Tesco, WHSmith, all good independent UK newsagents, and the Raspberry Pi Store, Cambridge.

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Learn how to code a sprinting minigame straight out of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon with Raspberry Pi’s own Rik Cross.

Spurred on by the success of Konami’s Hyper Sports, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon featured a wealth of controller-wrecking minigames.

Daley Thompson’s Decathlon

Released in 1984, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon was a memorable entry in what’s sometimes called the ‘joystick killer’ genre: players competed in sporting events that largely consisted of frantically waggling the controller or battering the keyboard. I’ll show you how to create a sprinting game mechanic in Python and Pygame.

Python sprinting game

There are variables in the Sprinter() class to keep track of the runner’s speed and distance, as well as global constant ACCELERATION and DECELERATION values to determine the player’s changing rate of speed. These numbers are small, as they represent the number of metres per frame that the player accelerates and decelerates.

The player increases the sprinter’s speed by alternately pressing the left and right arrow keys. This input is handled by the sprinter’s isNextKeyPressed() method, which returns True if the correct key (and only the correct key) is being pressed. A lastKeyPressed variable is used to ensure that keys are pressed alternately. The player also decelerates if no key is being pressed, and this rate of deceleration should be sufficiently smaller than the acceleration to allow the player to pick up enough speed.

Press the left and right arrow keys alternately to increase the sprinter’s speed. Objects move across the screen from right to left to give the illusion of sprinter movement.

For the animation, I used a free sprite called ‘The Boy’ from gameart2d.com, and made use of a single idle image and 15 run cycle images. The sprinter starts in the idle state, but switches to the run cycle whenever its speed is greater than 0. This is achieved by using index() to find the name of the current sprinter image in the runFrames list, and setting the current image to the next image in the list (and wrapping back to the first image once the end of the list is reached). We also need the sprinter to move through images in the run cycle at a speed proportional to the sprinter’s speed. This is achieved by keeping track of the number of frames the current image has been displayed for (in a variable called timeOnCurrentFrame).

To give the illusion of movement, I’ve added objects that move past the player: there’s a finish line and three markers to regularly show the distance travelled. These objects are calculated using the sprinter’s x position on the screen along with the distance travelled. However, this means that each object is at most only 100 pixels away from the player and therefore seems to move slowly. This can be fixed by using a SCALE factor, which is the relationship between metres travelled by the sprinter and pixels on the screen. This means that objects are initially drawn way off to the right of the screen but then travel to the left and move past the sprinter more quickly.

Finally, startTime and finishTime variables are used to calculate the race time. Both values are initially set to the current time at the start of the race, with finishTime being updated as long as the distance travelled is less than 100. Using the time module, the race time can simply be calculated by finishTime - startTime.

Here’s Rik’s code, which gets a sprinting game running in Python (no pun intended). To get it working on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. Download the code here.

Get your copy of Wireframe issue 23

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Autonauts is coming to colonise your computers with cuteness. We find out more in Wireframe issue 23.

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Weave through a randomly generated landscape in Mark Vanstone’s homage to the classic arcade game Scramble.

Scramble was developed by Konami and released in arcades in 1981. Players avoid terrain and blast enemy craft.

Konami’s Scramble

In the early eighties, arcades and sports halls rang with the sound of a multitude of video games. Because home computers hadn’t yet made it into most households, the only option for the avid video gamer was to go down to their local entertainment establishment and feed the machines with ten pence pieces (which were bigger then). One of these pocket money–hungry machines was Konami’s Scramble — released in 1981, it was one of the earliest side-scrolling shooters with multiple levels.

The Scramble player’s jet aircraft flies across a randomly generated landscape (which sometimes narrows to a cave system), avoiding obstacles and enemy planes, bombing targets on the ground, and trying not to crash. As the game continues, the difficulty increases. The player aircraft can only fly forward, so once a target has been passed, there’s no turning back for a second go.

Code your own scrolling landscape

In this example code, I’ll show you a way to generate a Scramble-style scrolling landscape using Pygame Zero and a couple of additional Pygame functions. On early computers, moving a lot of data around the screen was very slow — until dedicated video hardware like the blitter chip arrived. Scrolling, however, could be achieved either by a quick shuffle of bytes to the left or right in the video memory, or in some cases, by changing the start address of the video memory, which was even quicker.

Avoid the roof and the floor with the arrow keys. Jet graphic courtesy of TheSource4Life at opengameart.org.

For our scrolling, we can use a Pygame surface the same size as the screen. To get the scrolling effect, we just call the scroll() function on the surface to shift everything left by one pixel and then draw a new pixel-wide slice of the terrain. The terrain could just be a single colour, but I’ve included a bit of maths-based RGB tinkering to make it more colourful. We can draw our terrain surface over a background image, as the SRCALPHA flag is set when we create the surface. This is also useful for detecting if the jet has hit the terrain. We can test the pixel from the surface in front of the jet: if it’s not transparent, kaboom!

The jet itself is a Pygame Zero Actor and can be moved up and down with the arrow keys. The left and right arrows increase and decrease the speed. We generate the landscape in the updateLand() and drawLand() functions, where updateLand() first decides whether the landscape is inclining or declining (and the same with the roof), making sure that the roof and floor don’t get too close, and then it scrolls everything left.

Each scroll action moves everything on the terrain surface to the left by one pixel.

The drawLand() function then draws pixels at the right-hand edge of the surface from y coordinates 0 to 600, drawing a thin sliver of roof, open space, and floor. The speed of the jet determines how many times the landscape is updated in each draw cycle, so at faster speeds, many lines of pixels are added to the right-hand side before the display updates.

The use of randint() can be changed to create a more or less jagged landscape, and the gap between roof and floor could also be adjusted for more difficulty. The original game also had enemy aircraft, which you could make with Actors, and fuel tanks on the ground, which could be created on the right-hand side as the terrain comes into view and then moved as the surface scrolls. Scramble sparked a wave of horizontal shooters, from both Konami and rival companies; this short piece of code could give you the basis for making a decent Scramble clone of your own:

Here’s Mark’s code, which gets a Scramble-style scrolling landscape running in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

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Making player and computer-controlled cars race round a track isn’t as hard as it sounds. Mark Vanstone explains all.

The original Super Sprint arcade machine had three steering wheels and three accelerator pedals.

From Gran Trak 10 to Super Sprint

Decades before the advent of more realistic racing games such as Sega Rally or Gran Turismo, Atari produced a string of popular arcade racers, beginning with Gran Trak 10 in 1974 and gradually updated via the Sprint series, which appeared regularly through the seventies and eighties. By 1986, Atari’s Super Sprint allowed three players to compete at once, avoiding obstacles and collecting bonuses as they careened around the tracks.

The original arcade machine was controlled with steering wheels and accelerator pedals, and computer-controlled cars added to the racing challenge. Tracks were of varying complexity, with some featuring flyover sections and shortcuts, while oil slicks and tornadoes posed obstacles to avoid. If a competitor crashed really badly, a new car would be airlifted in by helicopter.

Code your own Super Sprint

So how can we make our own Super Sprint-style racing game with Pygame Zero? To keep this example code short and simple, I’ve created a simple track with a few bends. In the original game, the movement of the computer-controlled cars would have followed a set of coordinates round the track, but as computers have much more memory now, I have used a bitmap guide for the cars to follow. This method produces a much less predictable movement for the cars as they turn right and left based on the shade of the track on the guide.

Four Formula One cars race around the track. Collisions between other cars and the sides of the track are detected.

With Pygame Zero, we can write quite a short piece of code to deal with both the player car and the automated ones, but to read pixels from a position on a bitmap, we need to borrow a couple of objects directly from Pygame: we import the Pygame image and Color objects and then load our guide bitmaps. One is for the player to restrict movement to the track, and the other is for guiding the computer-controlled cars around the track.

Three bitmaps are used for the track. One’s visible, and the other two are guides for the cars.

The cars are Pygame Zero Actors, and are drawn after the main track image in the draw() function. Then all the good stuff happens in the update() function. The player’s car is controlled with the up and down arrows for speed, and the left and right arrows to change the direction of movement. We then check to see if any cars have collided with each other. If a crash has happened, we change the direction of the car and make it reverse a bit. We then test the colour of the pixel where the car is trying to move to. If the colour is black or red (the boundaries), the car turns away from the boundary.

The car steering is based on the shade of a pixel’s colour read from the guide bitmap. If it’s light, the car will turn right, if it’s dark, the car will turn left, and if it’s mid-grey, the car continues straight ahead. We could make the cars stick more closely to the centre by making them react quickly, or make them more random by adjusting the steering angle more slowly. A happy medium would be to get the cars mostly sticking to the track but being random enough to make them tricky to overtake.

Our code will need a lot of extra elements to mimic Atari’s original game, but this short snippet shows how easily you can get a top-down racing game working in Pygame Zero:

Here’s Mark’s code, which gets a Super Sprint-style racer running in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

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Raspberry Pi’s own Rik Cross shows you how to hit enemies with your mouse pointer as they move around the screen.

Duck Hunt made effective use of the NES Zapper, and made a star of its sniggering dog, who’d pop up to heckle you between stages.

Clicky Clicky Bang Bang

Shooting galleries have always been a part of gaming, from the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite in the 1930s to the light gun video games of the past 40 years. Nintendo’s Duck Hunt — played with the NES Zapper — was a popular console shooting game in the early eighties, while titles such as Time Crisis and The House of the Dead kept the genre alive in the 1990s and 2000s.

Here, I’ll show you how to use a mouse to fire bullets at moving targets. Code written to instead make use of a light gun and a CRT TV (as with Duck Hunt) would look very different. In these games, pressing the light gun’s trigger would cause the entire screen to go black and an enemy sprite to become bright white. A light sensor at the end of the gun would then check whether the gun is pointed at the white sprite, and if so, would register a hit. If more than one enemy was on the screen when the trigger was pressed, each enemy would flash white for one frame in turn, so that the gun would know which enemy had been hit.

Our simple shooting gallery in Python. You could try adding randomly spawning ducks, a scoreboard, and more.

Pygame Zero

I’ve used two Pygame Zero event hooks for dealing with mouse input. Firstly, the on_mouse_move() function updates the position of the crosshair sprite whenever the mouse is moved. The on_mouse_down() function reacts to mouse button presses, with the left button being pressed to fire a bullet (if numberofbullets > 0) and the right button to reload (setting numberofbullets to MAXBULLETS).

Each time a bullet is fired, a check is made to see whether any enemy sprites are colliding with the crosshair — a collision means that an enemy has been hit. Luckily, Pygame Zero has a colliderect() function to tell us whether the rectangular boundary around two sprites intersects.

If this helper function wasn’t available, we’d instead need to use sprites’ x and y coordinates, along with width and height data (w and h below) to check whether the two sprites intersect both horizontally and vertically. This is achieved by coding the following algorithm:

• Is the left-hand edge of sprite 1 further left than the right-hand edge of sprite 2 (x1 < x2+w2)?
• Is the right-hand edge of sprite 1 further right than the left-hand edge of sprite 2 (x1+w1 > x2)?
• Is the top edge of sprite 1 higher up than the bottom edge of sprite 2 (y1 < y2+h2)?
• Is the bottom edge of sprite 1 lower down than the top edge of sprite 2 (y1+h1 > y2)?

If the answer to the four questions above is True, then the two sprites intersect (see Figure 1). To give visual feedback, hit enemies briefly remain on the screen (in this case, 50 frames). This is achieved by setting a hit variable to True, and then decrementing a timer once this variable has been set. The enemy’s deleted when the timer reaches 0.

Figure 1: A visual representation of a collision algorithm, which checks whether two sprites intersect.

As well as showing an enemy for a short time after being hit, successful shots are also shown. A problem that needs to be overcome is how to modify an enemy sprite to show bullet holes. A hits list for each enemy stores bullet sprites, which are then drawn over enemy sprites.

Storing hits against an enemy allows us to easily stop drawing these hits once the enemy is removed. In the example code, an enemy stops moving once it has been hit.

If you don’t want this behaviour, then you’ll also need to update the position of the bullets in an enemy’s hits list to match the enemy movement pattern.

When decrementing the number of bullets, the max() function is used to ensure that the bullet count never falls below 0. The max() function returns the highest of the numbers passed to it, and as the maximum of 0 and any negative number is 0, the number of bullets always stays within range.

There are a couple of ways in which the example code could be improved. Currently, a hit is registered when the crosshair intersects with an enemy — even if they are barely touching. This means that often part of the bullet is drawn outside of the enemy sprite boundary. This could be solved by creating a clipping mask around an enemy before drawing a bullet. More visual feedback could also be given by drawing missed shots, stored in a separate list.

Here’s Rik’s code, which lets you hit enemies with your mouse pointer. To get it running on your system, you’ll first need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, go here.

Get your copy of Wireframe issue 20

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Raspberry Pi’s Rik Cross shows you how to create game states, and rules for moving between them.

Ninja Gaiden’s dramatic continue screen. Who would be cruel enough to walk away?

The continue screen, while much less common now, was a staple feature of arcade games, providing an opportunity (for a small fee) to reanimate the game’s hero and to pick up where they left off.

Continue Screens

Games such as Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden coin-op (known in some regions as Shadow Warriors) added jeopardy to their continue screen, in an effort to convince us to part with our money.

Often, a continue screen is one of many screens that a player may find themselves on; other possibilities being a title screen or an instruction screen. I’ll show you how you can add multiple screens to a game in a structured way, avoiding a tangle of if…else statements and variables.

A simple way of addressing this problem is to create separate update and draw functions for each of these screens, and then switch between these functions as required. Functions are ‘first-class citizens’ of the Python language, which means that they can be stored and manipulated just like any other object, such as numbers, text, and class instances. They can be stored in variables and other data types such as lists and dictionaries, and passed as parameters to (or returned from) other functions.

SNK’s Fantasy, released in 1981, was the first arcade game to feature a continue screen.

We can take advantage of the first-class nature of Python functions by storing the functions for the current screen in variables, and then calling them in the main update() and draw() functions. In the following example, notice the difference between storing a function in a variable (by using the function name without parentheses) and calling the function (by including parentheses).

[Ed. comment: We have to use an image here because WordPress doesn’t seem to allow code indentation. We know that’s annoying because you can’t copy and paste the code, so if you know a better solution, please leave us a comment.]

The example code above calls currentupdatefunction() and currentdrawfunction(), which each store a reference to separate update() and draw() functions for the continue screen. These continue screen functions could then also include logic for changing which function is called, by updating the function reference stored in currentupdatefunction and currentdrawfunction.

This way of structuring code can be taken a step further by making use of state machines. In a state machine, a system can be in one of a (finite) number of predefined states, and rules determine the conditions under which a system can transition from one state into another.

Rules define conditions that need to be satisfied in order to move between states.

A state machine (in this case a very simplified version) can be implemented by first creating a core State() class. Each game state has its own update() and draw() methods, and a rules dictionary containing state:rule pairs – references to other state objects linked to functions for testing game conditions. As an example, the continuescreen state has two rules:

• Transition to the gamescreen state if the SPACE key is pressed;
• Transition to the titlescreen state if the frame timer reaches 10.

This is pulled together with a StateMachine() class, which keeps track of the current state. The state machine calls the update() and draw() methods for the current state, and checks the rules for transitioning between states. Each rule in the current state’s rules list is executed, with the state machine updating the reference to its current state if the rule function returns True. I’ve also added a frame counter that is incremented by the state machine’s update() function each time it is run. While not a necessary part of the state machine, it does allow the continue screen to count down from 10, and could have a number of other uses, such as for animating sprites.

Something else to point out is the use of lambda functions when adding rules to states. Lambda functions are small, single-expression anonymous functions that return the result of evaluating its expression when called. Lambda functions have been used in this example simply to make the code a little more concise, as there’s no benefit to naming the functions passed to addrule().

State machines have lots of other potential uses, including the modelling of player states. It’s also possible to extend the state machine in this example by adding onenter() and onexit() functions that can be called when transitioning between states.

Here’s Rik’s code, which gets a simple continue screen up and running in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, visit our Github repository here.

Get your copy of Wireframe issue 19

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You too can recreate the techniques behind a pioneering 3D maze game in Python. Mark Vanstone explains how.

3D Monster Maze, released in 1982 by J.K. Greye software, written by Malcolm Evans.

3D Monster Maze

While 3D games have become more and more realistic, some may forget that 3D games on home computers started in the mists of time on machines like the Sinclair ZX81. One such pioneering game took pride of place in my collection of tapes, took many minutes to load, and required the 16K RAM pack expansion. That game was 3D Monster Maze — perhaps the most popular game released for the ZX81.

The game was released in 1982 by J.K. Greye Software, and written by Malcolm Evans. Although the graphics were incredibly low resolution by today’s standards, it became an instant hit. The idea of the game was to navigate around a randomly generated maze in search of the exit.

The problem was that a Tyrannosaurus rex also inhabited the maze, and would chase you down and have you for dinner if you didn’t escape quickly enough. The maze itself was made of straight corridors on a 16×18 grid, which the player would move around from one block to the next. The shape of the blocks were displayed by using the low-resolution pixels included in the ZX81’s character set, with 2×2 pixels per character on the screen.

The original ZX81 game drew its maze from chunky 2×2 pixel blocks.

Draw imaginary lines

There’s an interesting trick to recreating the original game’s 3D corridor display which, although quite limited, works well for a simplistic rendering of a maze. To do this, we need to draw imaginary lines diagonally from corner to corner in a square viewport: these are our vanishing point perspective guides. Then each corridor block in our view is half the width and half the height of the block nearer to us.

If we draw this out with lines showing the block positions, we get a view that looks like we’re looking down a long corridor with branches leading off left and right. In our Pygame Zero version of the maze, we’re going to use this wireframe as the basis for drawing our block elements. We’ll create graphics for blocks that are near the player, one block away, two, three, and four blocks away. We’ll need to view the blocks from the left-hand side, the right-hand side, and the centre.

The maze display is made by drawing diagonal lines to a central vanishing point.

Once we’ve created our block graphics, we’ll need to make some data to represent the layout of the maze. In this example, the maze is built from a 10×10 list of zeros and ones. We’ll set a starting position for the player and the direction they’re facing (0–3), then we’re all set to render a view of the maze from our player’s perspective.

The display is created from furthest away to nearest, so we look four blocks away from the player (in the direction they’re looking) and draw a block if there’s one indicated by the maze data to the left; we do the same on the right, and finally in the middle. Then we move towards the player by a block and repeat the process (with larger graphics) until we get to the block the player is on.

Each visible block is drawn from the back forward to make the player’s view of the corridors.

That’s all there is to it. To move backwards and forwards, just change the position in the grid the player’s standing on and redraw the display. To turn, change the direction the player’s looking and redraw. This technique’s obviously a little limited, and will only work with corridors viewed at 90-degree angles, but it launched a whole genre of games on home computers. It really was a big deal for many twelve-year-olds — as I was at the time — and laid the path for the vibrant, fast-moving 3D games we enjoy today.

Here’s Mark’s code, which recreates 3D Monster Maze’s network of corridors in Python. To get it running on your system, you’ll need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code, visit our Github repository here.

Get your copy of Wireframe issue 18

You can read more features like this one in Wireframe issue 18, available now at Tesco, WHSmith, and all good independent UK newsagents.

Or you can buy Wireframe directly from Raspberry Pi Press — delivery is available worldwide. And if you’d like a handy digital version of the magazine, you can also download issue 18 for free in PDF format.

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