1945 is a clone of the popular vertical scrolling shooter 1942. Again, the graphics in the game were taken from the Spritelib by Ari Feldman. This game will serve as the basis for the screencasts once we finish Arinoid. The screencasts will probably begin with screencast 6. In the meantime, I am hoping that you’ll find the source code useful, and just leave a comment on the site if you have any questions :) . I posted this in advance because one of the site’s readers needed some help with animations, which this game has but Arinoid doesn’t. Aside from animations, this game also features a scrolling background.

1945 screenshot

In this game, enemy planes just appear randomly from the top of the screen, move downward, and try shoot you. You, in turn, should avoid the enemy planes and shoot them down using your semi-rapid-fire gun. Despite the simple mechanics, I think that the current prototype is already fun to play – there’s something satisfying about clearing the screen of things, accompanied by explosions; this is the basic premise of many arcade games.

The code I used for the animations is heavily based on the animation code in aliens.py, which is included in the Pygame source distribution. I highly encourage you to study the code for that game, because a lot of what I know about Pygame came from studying that code :) .

The 1945 code branches off from the barebones code, and borrows from Arinoid. However, in contrast to the barebones app which uses RenderUpdates, 1945 uses RenderPlain, because the entire screen changes at every frame due to the scrolling background, so dirty rectangles aren’t necessary.

The link to the 1945 zip file appears below. As usual, Python and Pygame are needed to run the program.

1945 source

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.