Space Shooter Game

Lesson Aims

During the course of this lesson, students should be able to create a side-scroller alien shooter game, with keyboard controls.

Prerequisites

For this lesson to work, students need to have a python 2 programming environment ready, with pygame installed and ready to import. Raspberry Pis with Raspbian come with these prerequisites satisfied.

This lesson follows the “seperate text-editor & interpreter” model for writing code, rather than an integrated IDE. So students are expected to have a text editor and terminal open, and know how to run python on a specific .py file. Particular attention should be paid to which directory they are saving files, which directory the terminal is in, and not using spaces in names.

Which text editor is used is up to the teacher, but at a minimum, something with syntax highlighting should be used.

Assumptions

• Running python will launch Python 2.X not Python 3.X.. If you are teaching using arch linux, or something else that uses python 3 by default, look out for this. This can usually be circumvented by running the command python2 instead of python.

Attribution

All the images used in this lesson are either from opengameart.org, or were created by myself.

• alien_1.png - http://opengameart.org/content/space-shooter-top-down-2d-pixel-art - Public Domain
• alien_1_dead.png - a modified version of the above image, also released under Public Domain
• bullet.png - http://opengameart.org/content/bullet-collection-1-m484 - Public Domain
• ship_down.png, ship_normal.png and ship_up.png - http://opengameart.org/content/space-ship-3d2d - License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
• ship_destroyed.png - is a modified version of the ship based on the 3 images above and the explosion image found here: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Explosion-3-491196859

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