Developing a Developer: Weekly Report 5

This week I've corrected a few bugs there were in staircase.py. One of them – for example – allowed the player to jump while falling if he/she fell without jumping... Anyway, the current version includes further changes (I even changed the name of the project to “Platforms” and divided the program into files instead of keeping a single file). The program is organized in classes and since I read chapter 19 I've included a few things related with imported images. Let's begin.

Link to the project source code (zipfile).

Screenshot of Platforms

 

This game test is divided into several classes. Perhaps, the most important class is “Collisionable”. This class contains a Pygame “rect” object reference as an attribute. This “rect” object is the actual responsible of controlling collision between itself and other objects (including the player). Many of the remaining classes are children of “Collisionable” and they implement their own behaviour (platforms, mobile platforms, buttons, etc).

While chapter 19 taught me to load external images and place them into the game, it has only examples on putting a static picture and moving it around the screen. In this project, I've used texture images like the following:

Background texture

Platform's texture

 

If you pay attention to this texture images, you will see that the leftmost part fits with the rightmost part of the picture. The same happens with the top and the bottom of the picture. The only thing I have to do is to replicate the picture over and over again throughout the entire surface I want to have that texture. In order to fulfill that purpose, I created the Texture class. When a Texture object is created, the constructor copies the picture pixel by pixel into the Pygame “rect” object that requires that texture. In my opinion, this algorithm is quite slow and inefficient, but it allows me to store the calculated surface into an attribute and therefore needing to make the calculation only once in the execution of the game.

The pictures were downloaded from http://opengameart.org.