JOURNAL.md

IT-229-A Project 1 Journal

11/3/2019 - Project Initialization

To begin this project, I started by:

• Creating this journal
• Defining python module requirements in requirements.txt
  • The only require python module as of now is pygame
• Creating a python virtual environment with the commmand python -m venv ai_venv
  • From now on, work on this project (including module installation) will take place within this "venv".
  • To activate (on Windows): .\ai_venv\Scripts\activate
  • To deactivate: deactivate
• Installing the required packages by running pip -r requirements.txt
• Completed the project steps in chapter 12
  • A few minor changes where made, but the code mostly follows what is laid out in the book.
• Created a .gitignore file to exclude non-project files
• Created a README.md file for the project
• Create a git repository for the project and pushed it to GitHub

11/9/2019 - Aliens!

• Implemented aliens in the game as detailed in chapter 13
• Ran into a new issue: pylint is giving errors about pygame not existing in my IDE. Unsure how to fix this at this time.
• Also implemented play button and dynamic difficulty scaling as detailed in chapter 14.

11/10/2019 - Scoring

• Implemented scoreboard and remaining ships diplay functionality as detailed in chapter 14.
• Issues with pylint persist - still need to get around to fixing that.

11/11/2019 - Finishing touches

• Implemented challenge/try-it-yourself feature 14-1: the ability to press P to play.
• Implemented challenge/try-it-yourself feature 14-5: persistent high scores
• Fixed 'pygame has no member attribute' errors in pylint by adding the following to VSCode's settings.json:

  "python.linting.pylintArgs": [
      "--extension-pkg-whitelist=pygame"
  ]
  

  • Solution was found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50569453/why-does-it-say-that-module-pygame-has-no-init-member
  • This seems to have fixed other issues with pylint I was unaware of, as pylint has found new issues for me to fix.
• Completed challenge/try-it-yourself feature 14-7: code refactoring.
• Tweaked the scoreboard to have labels, and to render fonts with a transparent background.
  • I made the font render with a transparent background by ommitting the last argument to pygame.font.render:

  # Non-transparent background
  self.high_score_image = self.font.render(score_str, True, self.text_color,
                                               self.settings.bg_color)
  # Transparent background
  self.high_score_image = self.font.render(score_str, True, self.text_color)
  

Next steps:

• Customize the game to match retro Space Invaders look'n'feel.