Space Rescue Tutorials

Tutorials for building a 2D space game in Python with Pygame and the GameFrame framework, then improving it with game design mechanics. Written for Year 9/10 Digital Technologies students using VS Code (Thonny also works).

Live site: https://damom73.github.io/space-rescue-tutorials/

Students build the game in their own copy of the Space Rescue Resources repo, which holds GameFrame and all the images and sounds.

Preview the site

pip install -r requirements.txt
zensical serve

Then open http://localhost:8000. To build the site: zensical build --clean (expect No issues found).

Scripts

• python scripts/make_zip.py builds docs/downloads/space_rescue_checkpoints.zip: the game's code at the end of every lesson and game design page, plus the demo games.
• python scripts/check_explanations.py checks every Code explanation box against the code it explains (expect 0 issue(s) found).
• python scripts/test_checkpoints.py --starter ../space-rescue-resources plays every checkpoint headless with scripted key presses and reports any crash (needs pygame and a clone of the resources repo).

Layout

zensical.toml                 site config and navigation
docs/
  index.md                    home page
  start/                      introduction, setup, GameFrame overview
  lessons/                    the 14 lessons that build the core game
  design/                     game design and the mechanic pages
  own_game/                   planning, flowcharts, other game types, databases
  reference/                  GameFrame API, topic index, common errors, finished game, Thonny, licence
  examples/<section>/<page>/stepNN/<path>.py
                              every version of every file shown on a page
  assets/                     images
  stylesheets/extra.css       colours, callouts and code block styles
  downloads/                  the checkpoint zip
scripts/                      make_zip.py, check_explanations.py, test_checkpoints.py
design/                       draw.io sources for the diagrams

A stepNN folder holds only the files that changed in that step, at their path in the game (for example step03/Objects/Ship.py). Pages include them with --8<-- "examples/..." and mark new or changed lines with hl_lines.

Licence

Content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Code is licensed under GPLv3. GameFrame is by Steven Tucker, under the GNU GPL.