README

Quickly-made Chrome Dinosaur running game used to anticipate challenges and workload when tutoring!

Made with pygame (and some nostalgia ☺️)

Quickstart

1. Install Python if you don't have it on your computer; you'll need this to run the game.
2. Download the code: if you have git on your computer, clone the repo (see command below). Otherwise, download the code by clicking on Code and Download ZIP, and then extract the code by unzipping the .zip file. If you've chosen to clone the repo, you can use the command git clone https://github.com/srcoulombe/dino_runner.git.
3. Create a virtual environment to make sure installing pygame in step 5 won't affect any other pygame project you might have. To do this, open the command line, navigate to the folder called dino_runner (or the name you specified when cloning/downloading/extracting the repo), and use the command python3 -m venv dino_runner_venv. NOTE if you get an error running this command, try python -m venv dino_runner_venv. If you still have problems, open a new Issue in the GitHub repo to explain what you did (please include the error message you got).
4. Activate the virtual environment: open the command line, navigate to the folder called dino_runner (or the name you specified when cloning/downloading/extracting the repo), and use source dino_runner_venv/bin/activate if you're using MacOS or Linux as your operating system, or .\dino_runner_venv\Scripts\activate if you're using Windows.
5. Install pygame (you'll need this to run the game) in your virtual environment by using pip install pygame. Alternatively, you can use pip install -r requirements.txt.
6. You can now run the game by entering the following in your command line: python3 main.py (or python main.py).

Demo

Extending this Codebase

Feel free to fork this repo if you'd like to use this codebase as a starting point!

Tutoring Notes

Recurring Challenges:

I noticed the following were frequent topics that either led to insightful discussions or to problems in the codebase:

• When to compartmentalize functionality in classes or outside classes (e.g., if the collision detection functionality should be defined in the DinoAvatar class or as a stand-alone function in the main.py file).
• pygame's coordinate system places the origin (0,0) at the top-left corner.
• Reading code is tougher than writing code! Documentation, commenting, and journaling helps!

What Now?

Completing the base game seemed to be satisfying and led to a feeling of accomplishment, but the question of "What now?" kept popping up. In anticipation of different tutorees' interests and preferences, I've identified the following as possible areas for continuing work:

• Adding advanced jumping functionality (to improve general Python programming and game development skills)
  • Prolonging jumping (high jumps and low jumps)
  • Ducking in mid-air stopping the jump
• Adding a leaderboard (to learn about serialization and JSON)
• Adding C H A O S M O D E (to improve general Python programming and game development skills)
  • Inverting the game screen
  • Inverting keyboard commands
  • Inverting obstacle-generation logic (floating cacti, walking bird)
  • Reversing the game (stop, and move from right -> left rather than left -> right)