Way back when I was still in secondary school, my class had the NEA project for our computer science A-level. It was coursework that we where supposed to be doing across the 2 years of our A-levels where we would have to do an extensive document of our progress from the software we would have to make for the project. Comically, this didn't happen as intended as my school failed to provide a consistent, qualified computer science teacher for the 2 years!
Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), I had my dad to help me make sure I did my NEA right, despite some tense moments. I am truly thankful that my dad was there to help me during that, but anyways, it's time to talk about what I actually did.
When I heard that we could decide what software we could make for the NEA project, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to have a go at programming my own game in PyGame. The game I thought up of was a 2 player game, each player would control a spaceship on the top and bottom of the game environment. The players would have to try and shoot the other to score the most points whilst dodging bullets by moving left and right within a time limit. The scores and winner could then be saved to a MySQL database once the timer ran out. Despite sounding simple, there was some complexity to programming the game. I can still remember trying to figure out how to make the game just run at a certain speed and being stuck on this problem for an entire day.
You can play the game here!
Controls:
P1 move left = left arrow ; P2 move left = key A key
P1 move right = right arrow key ; P2 move right= D key
P1 fire = up arrow key ; P2 fire = W key
Next round = Enter key
Programming With Nick's tutorial on getting a PyGame into a web browser was a great help for my game. You can find his tutorial on this below: