Ronan’s game
In the Python Games group today we continued working on our ping pong games. We will spend another session on them.
There won’t be any Python Games session next Saturday the 31st of January but we will be back the following Saturday the 07th of February.
Alaidhs game
As we have covered most of the concepts required to make games using Pygame I won’t be doing any more slideshows instead we will spend all of our time writing games from now on. Today we started to make a very simple Ping Pong game and we will spend another session or two finishing it.
Anybody who has missed a few sessions is always welcome back, but now would be a great time to return as we will be explaining everything from the beginning again.
Today in the python games group we learned more about moving our sprites. We used the Pygame rotate method to rotate our sprites and we used trigonometry to control our sprites movement. We started working on a ping pong game which we will finish next week. Here is our example code from today and my slides are available here python session_9
Apologies for the delay in posting the notes from yesterday. In the Python Games group we finally finished our Ocean Cleaner game which we are looking forward to demonstrating to everybody next Saturday.
In order to finish our game we had to learn about adding audio and health bars. The demo code we used is available on Dropbox here and our completed Ocean Cleaner game is available here. Here are my slides python session_8
Today the Python games group explored one of the most important things used in graphical computer games, collision detection. We also investigated the use of lists and for loops to manipulate sprites in our games. Our demo code is available here.
We are still working on our ocean game and we will add audio next week.
These are my slides from today python session_7
Last week we relocated to NUIG for a Massive Open Dojo Session. There was lots going on to enjoy and it was great to see such a large turn out. Well done to our own Michael Madden and to Karl Sweeney from CoderDojo Galway City for organizing it all. Thanks also to Martha for the t-shirts.
The ninjas from the Python Games group who attended didn’t do any new coding but they enjoyed personalizing the Bunnies And Badgers game with their own images. We were set a challenge to create a game to highlight the environmental issues facing the oceans. We started working on that today and we will continue with that for a few weeks. 
Before we started working on that today we had a look at some basic Python concepts contained in this demo program. Next week we will look at using lists and for loops in Pygame and at collision detection.
Here are my slides from today python session_6
We learned about some new concepts today in the Python Games group – multi-line strings, lists, for loops, methods, elif statements and the dictionary data type.
We had a quick look at the Hangman Game from Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python (http://inventwithpython.com/chapter9.html). We covered Lists which are a way of storing a number of values in one variable and had some fun writing code snippets mainly based around X-Factor. We looked at some new ways of working with strings called multi-line strings. We also learned about new types of functions called methods and a new type of loop called a for loop. At the end of the session we started to get to grips with Pygame. Our code snippets are available here and my slides from today are here python session_4
Today the Python Games group continued working on our adventure game. We looked at some tools which are useful for planning out our games, flowcharts, storyboards and pseudo code.
Our flow chart from today
Some of today’s pseudo code
My slides from today are available here python session_3
We made fantastic progress again in the Python Games stream.
We covered Escape Characters, Functions and Boolean Logic (with a quick look at logic gates). Then we looked at the Dragon’s Realm game code available here.
We had a brainstorming session with some great ideas from the ninjas for our own adventure game which we are going to start coding next week.
My slides from today are available here.python session_2
We covered a lot of ground today in the Python Games stream . We looked at variables including strings, math operators, inputs and outputs, while loops and if statements. The code from our number guessing game along with some of the code snippets from today are available here.
Ninjas can read the first few chapters of Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python as they deal with the same concepts.
Next week we will run through what we have covered so far, do more work on improving our number guessing game and if we have time, start working on a text based adventure game. Here are my slides fron today’s session python2014_session1.
CoderDojo Athenry 