• A more advanced version of Pygame Terminal

In Pygame Terminal we discussed a very basic kind of game terminal. This can be used to create many kinds of games such as the Robots game.

However, we may like to increase the functionality of this framework by adding a few quality of life features.

The first major change is in the Game class draw loop. The first part of the Game class now looks like this:

import pygame

class Game:
    def __init__(self, window):
        self.window = window
        self.screen = window.screen
        self.logo = window.logo
        self.font = window.font

        # Game Data
        self.FPS = 60
        self.clock = pygame.time.Clock()

    def start(self):
        while True:
            self.checkEvents()
            self.update()
            self.draw()
            self.clock.tick(self.FPS)

    def draw(self):
        self.screen.fill((0, 0, 0))  # Clear the screen
        self.drawText(0, 2, "it works!", "gray")
        pygame.display.flip()

    def update(self):
        pass

    def checkEvents(self):
        cmd = ""
        for event in pygame.event.get():
            if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
                self.quit()
                return

            if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
                # key down event, process keys.

                if event.key == pygame.K_q:
                    self.quit()

    def drawText(self, at_x, at_y, text, color):
        text_surface = self.font.render(text, False, color)
        x = self.window.fontwidth * at_x
        y = self.window.fontheight * at_y
        self.screen.blit(text_surface, (x + 2, y))

    def quit(self):
        quit()
        exit()

As you can see we have moved to using self.clock.tick(self.FPS), and have split the check events and update loops. We will also add a quit function. The quit function will have more importance later, such as if we need to save game state when exiting.

update() is important because, until now, we have been responding to the user's input as it happens, and we have been 'tagging along' mob movement and game system updates to this directly (as in the robots game). However, to be more strict we should keep these in an update() function which updates the game state even if the player is not typing anything. This allows for more freedom in how the game could be designed, such as in the javascript Shooty Ships game.