nuthole.com

2004 04 20 - Tue

spinvaders 0.0.1

posted by jack at 06:24 CET in / compute / programming / spinvaders

In my copious amounts of spare time (ha), I've recently been teaching myself both python and game programming using a fine cross-platform library called pygame. I have some results!

screenshot spinvaders is a direct descendant of the old "Space Invaders" type of game. This first public test release, version 0.0.1, is fully playable and may even be fun! The controls for the game are described at the startup screen, everything should be pretty obvious. One undocumented feature of this test version is that pressing "J" will let you jump to any level.

spinvaders for Macintosh (OS X 10.3 or later)
spinvaders for Windows (95/98/ME/W2K/XP)

The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting "spinvaders.exe" from within the directory.

Please try it out and let me know what you think by adding a comment below.

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Comments

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Re: spinvaders 0.0.1
Nick wrote on Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:43

spinvaders is the most addictive game i have ever played. i stayed up for 96 hours with eyes glued to the screen...my wife finally had to burn the computer to get me away from it.

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Re: spinvaders 0.0.1
Nick wrote on Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:49

P.S. You should port BLAZEMONGER to python.

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0.0.1 doesn't run here
Jeff wrote on Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:02

Mac os x 10.3.3 (whatever the latest is).

nothing under the spinvaders menu

Maybe it's the python that's with mac os... do I need an upgrade from macpython or whatever? Give me a link if so.

Thanks

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Re: 0.0.1 doesn't run here
Jack wrote on Thu, 22 Apr 2004 01:25

You don't have a window opening up or anything? The menu is normally empty (at this point... I intend to populate this eventually, but it's a bit more laborious using python than good old Objective-C), but you should have a smallish (320x320) window opening up where the actual gameplay occurs. If not, could you check your Console logs and see if you see anything suspicious there?

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BSD package
Jack wrote on Tue, 25 May 2004 09:53

Make sure you have the "optional" BSD package installed. You may have unchecked this when installing Mac OS X, in which case you'll be missing a couple of key pieces which are required to run python software such as spinvaders.

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Re: spinvaders 0.0.1
Martin wrote on Sun, 27 Jun 2004 10:27

What's specific about 10.3? Why won't it work on 10.2.8?

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10.3 includes python
Jack wrote on Thu, 01 Jul 2004 11:58

10.3 is the first version of Mac OS X that includes the python interpreter. It would be pretty easy for me to build this for 10.2.8, making it use a version of python contained in the app, but it would require me reinstalling 10.2 on a machine somwhere (and I haven't gotten around to it).

Supporting 10.2 would be nice I suppose, although as time goes by it will be less and less of an issue...

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