Spicy Clicker is a simple mouse game created in Python where the aim is to click on the chilli pepper as many times as possible in one minute. The modules used in the code include pygame, sys, random, time and os. The base template came from Blackboard.
31/3/2021 - Created basic game functionality, including:
• a red dot as a target
• an image of Shaquille O’Neal’s face as the cursor
• target relocates when clicked
• a firelock to prevent the player from holding left click
6/4/2021
• Changed target sprite to a spicy chilli
• Added fire background
• Added score counter that increments when target is clicked
13/4/2021
• Added timer
• Added display final score
• Removed unnecessary colours
14/4/2021
• Fixed exiting delay bug
• Changed game window title to ‘Spicy Clicker’
I wanted my game to be a simple clicking game with a points counter that goes up every time you click on the target with the cursor, testing the player’s reflexes. The score counter was simple to implement- I simply created a variable called score that increased when the target was clicked and used pygame’s font, render and blit functions to create a scoreboard in the top left of the screen screen. The target would relocate to a random location every time it was clicked, which was achieved by generating random coordinates within the boundaries of the 1000 by 800 window. I also had to take into account the dimensions of the target, because if it relocated to the very edge of the window it would be it impossible for the player to see. To prevent the user from simply holding down left click and wiping their cursor all over the window, I implemented a firelock that made the lift the left mouse button if they wanted to ‘shoot’ again. To give purpose to the game, I implemented a 60-second timer in the top right of the screen. It uses the imported time module to store the time the game started, and every game loop it checks the time elapsed by subtracting the start time from the current time.
To play the game it is necessary to have Python3 installed (download from https://www.python.org/downloads/) as well as the module for pygame (type pip install pygame in command prompt). The other modules come built-in with Python. The accompanying images that make up the background and sprites should be in the same directory as the .py run file. The hardware required is very minimal, as it only uses about 24MB of RAM. Once these requirements are fulfilled, simply run the game file in your preferred Python interpreter (e.g. Thonny, Pycharm, Visual Studio Code, IDLE).
set frames per second to 60
set game windows size 1000 x 800
create game window
load player1 image
scale player1 image to 100x150
load target image
scale target image to 90x90
target_coords randomX, randomY
load background image
scale background image to 1000x800
firelock <-- False
score <-- 0
set mouse to invisible
start_time current_time
total_time = 60
WHILE current_time - start_time < total_time DO
START EVENT MONITOR
IF user_has_quit = True THEN
Quit
END IF
IF left_mouse_button_down = True AND firelock = False THEN
IF player1 collides with target THEN
target_coords randomX, randomY
score <-- score + 1
firelock <-- True
END IF
END IF
IF left_mouse_button_up = True THEN
Firelock <-- FALSE
END IF
END OF EVENT MONITOR
BEGIN EVENT HANDLER
render background at 0,0
load mouse_coords
render player1 at mouse_coords
render target at randomX, randomY
render score at 10,10
time_remaining total_time – (current_time – start_time)
render time_remaining at 700,10
END EVENT HANDLER
display screen
END WHILE
render background at 0,0
render (“Final score is”, score) at 400,350
close game window
1. Install the pygame modules into your preferred Python 3 interpreter
2. Keep the .py file and the supporting images in the same file directory.
3. Run the .py file in your interpreter.
https://www.101computing.net/pong-tutorial-using-pygame-adding-a-scoring-system/ (6/4/2021)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28005641/how-to-add-a-background-image-into-pygame (6/4/2021)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26002497/how-to-run-a-background-timer-in-python (13/4/2021)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3718657/how-do-you-properly-determine-the-current-script-directory (14/4/2021)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40566585/how-to-change-the-name-of-a-pygame-window (14/4/2021)