Rowdy Arcade

Inspiration

We were inspired by classic arcade games and wanted to challenge ourselves to utilize the python package of pygame to recreate the classic arcade experience.

What it does

Our arcade has a shell script that has a text based menu to allow the user to pick and choose between three games. The script will then execute the chosen game based on user input to allow them to experience a blast from the past.

How we built it

We created a shell script for our menu to call the python files corresponding to each game. The python files we created that execute each game utilized the python library pygame, and basic pixel art assets that we imported. Although we all coded in python for the individual games, we used different platforms like Jupyter notebook and visual studio code independently before we came together and assembled it through our powershell script that is our menu.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into multiple issues with pygame as we were new to it. Some challenges we faced were implementing class attributes and seeing how pygame functions like move() would interact with it, so we decided to use a different approach instead. When linking the working directory to our assets folder, we had to import os to manually change the working directory so we could have our cute images display for games like space invader. The largest challenge we faced was how to combine our scripts to execute in the most time efficient way, which we determined to be a shell script that uses a terminal to prompt the user for input then executes the corresponding py file so we didn't have to translate our individual python files to large functions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud that we managed to recreate classic games like space invaders, snake, and ping pong by using python's pygame library. We're also proud that we stuck through and completed the project together although at times it was definitely easy to give up when we got seemingly endless errors. Also thankful for systems programming that gave us the idea to use powershell when we didn't know how to execute a python file in another file for the menu.

What we learned

We learned a lot about pygame and the different libraries we could take advantage of to bring us past mere text and code to a visual platform that can be used as a coherent UI. We also learned a lot about each other and our ability to work as a team.

What's next for Rowdy Arcade

We would implement an AI player for pong, upgrade the UI experience in terms of images and sound, add complexity to space invaders by adding levels and having a space battle as a boss, implement different powerups with different fruits for the snake game, and get pygame_menu to work as a good menu instead of powershell for our project.