What’s The Story, Muthur?
To the point, tabletop gaming
Popular Posts
I guess I’m a videogame developer now, too
I found a video which talks you through making a videogame in PyGame (that’s another Python library, like PySpark). Massive thanks to the author for making a really good tutorial, that’s really easy to follow.
By JimmiWazEre
Opinionated tabletop gaming chap
TL;DR:
A backend database developer takes a work Python course, then runs with it — building two free games from scratch: Meteor Blast (a top-down shooter with custom pixel art and powerups) and P0N6 FL1P! (a cooperative Pong twist where you work with the AI to keep a rally going). Both are available on GitHub.
Introduction
Hey folks, how’re you doing? I’m gonna go right on and pretend you answered: “Good thanks”, great to hear it. Bit of an unusual one for you today: So, I’m a backend database developer by trade, right? And if you know anything about the industry, you’ll know it’s moving in the direction of cloud computing and PySpark.
Which is all well and good, but I found myself with a rapidly aging skillset - cranking out SQL scripts triggered by BASH. So when the opportunity came up at work to do a week long crash course in Python - I thought: “yeah why not, sounds good”.
I made a thing!
After I finished the Python course I wanted to consolodate my learning. For you guys at the back, that’s just a business jargon way of saying that I wanted to put my learning into practice before I forgot it! So I found this video on youtube by Clear Code which talks you through making a videogame in PyGame (that’s another Python library, like PySpark). Massive thanks to the author for making a really good video, that’s really easy to follow.
I ended up finishing his first Pygame tutorial/project which brings you to a point where you’ve got a barebones engine for a top down, 2d meteor shooting game. Then I went a bit nuts, I replaced all the stock art with pixel GFX that appeals to me (AI gen, or derived from AI gen), added particle explosions, a splash screen, an animated background, powerups, and a persistant leaderboard. The end product is something I’m pretty proud of:
So, I made another thing!
I wanted to follow Meteor Blast up with something that I could make without such a heavy reliance on tutorials or other external resources (I still used them ofc, but less so) so I decided to remake the classic game, Pong.
About halfway through making Pong, I decided that it was an interesting tech flex, but an awful game. The issue is that the AI paddle is so dumb that beating it takes a couple of seconds at most. That’s when it hit me - what if the objective wasn’t to beat the AI, but rather it was to work with it to keep a rally going for as long as possible?
P0N6 FL1P! was born! Like Pong, but way better, and with powerups!
Conclusion
So that’s what I’ve been up to lately, and I’m hoping that I’ve got another bun in the oven too - I’ll post about that if and when it happens, so no promises.
If you’d like to play either of my games, they’re available for free (Meteor Blast & P0N6 FL1P!) from my Github as executable files (Windows and Linux only I’m afraid, Linux users like me will need to “chmod +x” the file once it’s downloaded before it runs). I’m still finding the odd bug on them too, so if you find one, drop me a comment below to let me know.
Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running! If you’ve still got some time to kill, Perhaps I can persuade you to click through below to another one of my other posts?
Catch you laters, alligators.
