Outlaws

Outlaws

Inspiration

Space Invaders and Journey of the Prairie King from Stardew Valley.

What it does

It's a simple 2D shooter game.

How we built it

We used pygame.

Challenges we ran into

We found making the enemies spawning and movement difficult. This included making an enemy class and a list of enemies to keep track of all of the enemies. We had to go through all the enemies in the list and have them moved and drawn where they were supposed to be at a reasonable speed. This was difficult since the enemy movement was significantly different from the player movement. We also had difficulties designing the menus because the text and placement of the buttons menus had to be made so that they fit together. Another difficulty was that we sometimes had the program not work or display anything when we changed parts of the program, so we had to work without definitive feedback on what we were doing during those times. We wanted to implement a way to go back to the menu of the game to start over without quitting out of the program, but just going back to the menu didn’t reset the game state, so we had to remove that as it was causing problems and we were close to the submission deadline. Sometimes we encountered commit errors when using Github and it was difficult to figure out how to merge two files that had been edited.

What we learned

We learned how to use Github, Python, and Pygame to make a game in python. In the process of making the game we learned how to have the game run continuously at a consistent time. This meant having the FPS (frames per second) consistent so that the game’s speed didn’t change significantly as new entities were being drawn on the screen. We learned how to implement classes in Python, and how Sprites work in Pygame. We learned how to make the player and enemies move smoothly without jitters and how to have collision between entities (the bullets with the player and enemies in particular).