xrisk / mandalorian

DASS Assignment 1

Rishav Kundu - 2019121007

Controls

• w a s: up, left, right
• q: fire bullet (1s cooldown)
• <space>: activate shield, which prevents loss of lives (60s cooldown)
• b: speeds up the game

To exit, press <Ctrl-C>

Functionality

• Collect coins to increase your score (1pt)
• Stay away from the fire beams. Otherwise lose one life when you touch a beam! You can also shoot the beams to get 5 points.
• Activate the shield to temporarily prevent losing lives!
• You have a total of 3 lives.
• Going near the magnets will pull you towards them!
• You cannot destroy the magnet and neither will the shield protect you from it!
• The final boss has 5 health.

Cool features

• I calculate the actual fps and compare it to the expected fps. Quite a stark difference is observable, implying that my code is not very efficient :P
• I wrote the input reading code from scratch, as I was not satisfied with the existing solutions (input lag + spurious blank reads). I use a separate thread along with a mutex for continuosly reading input, ensuring there is no delay.

Game architecture overview

• I keep a list of all entities in the game.
• On every tick, I
  • clear the draw buffer
  • call the tick() and render() methods on all entities.

OOPS overview

• Inheritance: All objects in the game inherit from a common Entity class. The Snowballs fired by the boss are derived from Mando's bullets.

• Polymorphism: The game loop does not care about the types of individual objects, meaning that all objects have a common tick() and render() API and can be rendered without object specific knowledge.

• Encapsulation: Underscored variables have been used to denote private APIs. Corresponding getters/setters are provided.

• Abstraction: As such there is no abstraction, as each entity takes care of its own internal operations and doesn't expose any operations such as move() or attack(). However, my API design wherein every entity is reduced to its render() and tick() method is a good example of abstraction in the system. Some other smaller examples like Mando's decrement_life() exist as well.

Module Overview

• beam.py: represents the Beam entity
• bullet.py: represents the Bullet entity and contains functionality to check collisions, etc.
• coin.py: coins
• entity.py: contains the parent class of all entities in the game. decleares the abstract methods render and tick and also defines the protected position variables x and y
• floor.py: floor and sky
• magnet.py: magnets
• mando.py: mando and associated collision logic as well as movement logic and interaction with the magnet
• screen.py: an interface for drawing to the screen via a buffer
• main.py: contains the main Game class which stores several game attributes. Also responsible for running the main game loop

Improvements

• Better class design - Right now, a couple of classes have too much functionality inside their render() methods, which should ideally be decomposed into smaller methods. For example, mando's render should be reduced into move, attack, shield, etc. methods.

• Performance - I clear the game buffer on every tick. This is not very efficient computationally.

ASCII art credits

• Brick Wall: https://ascii.co.uk/art/brickwall

• Dragon ASCII art: John VanderZwaag