The Hullet Bells – Part 5 (Valuing your Input)

What is Input Handling, anyway? Handling input is the process of taking the player’s key presses and converting them to actions in game. Pygame supports two methods for doing this: 1) Examining the state of the keyboard directly each frame, which I’ll refer to as the key state method. 2) Key events, where the game […]

The Hullet Bells – Part 4 (Insert Title Here)

The title screen! At this point in game development, it’s probably a waste of time, especially if you’ve already decided to implement a handler system that will let you slot the title screen in at the end. But what’s done is done, so here it is! Obviously a work of art. In this post, I’d […]

The Hullet Bells – Part 3 (Handling It)

Handling transitions between various screens was one of the problems my friends and I encountered when developing our shmup game at university. For instance, it was a pain getting the game flow moving from the title screen to the game screen, from game screen to loading screen, and so on. Because of the way we […]

The Hullet Bells – Part 2 (Getting Organised)

Recently I embarked upon a quest: a quest to produce a platform game, the likes of which the world had never known. However, I got bored of that, but not before exercising my Python chops. Although I failed, I discovered the wonderful pygame library. Pygame is a Python wrapper for the ever-popular C++ SDL library, […]

The Hullet Bells – Part 1 (A Primer on Shmups)

As a would-be hardcore gamer, for me shoot ’em ups, or ‘shmups’, are a fascinating intersection of complexity, fun and playability. With humble roots in Space Invaders, shmups began with a simple premise: The player controls a ship (or perhaps a flying witch or android) and must defend themselves against wave after wave of enemy […]