PyGameWorkhop

This repo contains lessons used in a PyGame after school program.

Activities

Lessons are group into Activities.

Each Activity has a planned duration of 90 mins.

Most Activities are either complete games or complete game levels.

The Activities are ordered.

Each new Activity builds on the knowledge and reuses the code from older Activities.

Wormy

In this Activity, students build the classic arcade game, Snake (also known as Nibbles).

The code used in this lesson was inspired by Wormy (a Nibbles clone) from Al Sweigart:

When this Lesson is complete, the student will have developed a complete game.

Lesson 1 - hello wormy

• game initialization

  • specific to Raspberry Pi's in text mode

  • optimized for a 1280x1024 display (classroom default)

• basic game loop

while true:
    display();

• display text

Lesson 2 - goodbye wormy

• basic event handling

while GAME_IS_RUNNING:
    handle_events();
    display_game();

• key press to end game

Lesson 3 - spinning hello

• updating game objects

while GAME_IS_RUNNING:
    handle_events();
    update_game_objects();
    display_game();

• text rotates with each game loop

• framerate (speed up, slowdown)

Lesson 4 - game scens

• each game scene has its own game loop

• switch scenes

• game board with grid and scoreboard

Lesson 5 - random apples

• basic drawing

• random drawing

• list of objects to draw each frame

• use + - keys to add remove random apples

Lesson 6 - wormy lives (and dies)

• use arrow keys to move, one square at a time

• use arrow keys to choose direction

• game ends, end game scene

Lesson 7 - wormy eats apples

• scoreboard is updated

• new apples replace eaten apples

• different kinds of apples

Lesson 7 - wormy grows

• wormy has an array of body parts

• each part follows the previous

• wormy shouldn't eat himself

Lesson 8 - endgame

• lives

• high scorelist

Lesson 9 - credits

• scrolling credit scene

• game optimization and feature requests