Our Adventure in coding combining History with Pygame 🗺 👩🏻‍💻
by Python Vipers
Our group (Ian and I, Cayden) created this team. Our goal is to create a game that would educate people who will still have fun at the same time. We want people to comprehend better in a specific subject, history. To begin with, we were just trying to get to know each other better and decide what subject and format the game should be. We eventually chose to do a historic fighting game based on Forge of Empires, Age of Empires and Stick war.
In the game, the objective is to take all the territories in a level or age, so you can move up to the next one. In each territory, you must defeat the enemy army or complete whatever the objective is. You start in the Stone Age, which Cayden is making. I think you have to take over the different colored territories. You move up to the next level, which is the Bronze Age level. This level focuses on Ancient Greece and their Persian enemies. In order to move up, you must take over 5 territories, the Jungle, Plains, Forest, Desert and Tundra. The next level is Mediaeval and you must fight in well-known battles such as the battles in Scotland’s war for independence. After the mediaeval you will move on to much more modern battles, possibly the Civil War and confirmed, ww2. In these battles, you will also play on the sides of more modern battles such as D-day.
The bronze age is the second age. It definitely gives you the authentic Greek experience. Not the romantic clay houses with blue domed roofs overseeing the sunset type, but the one a thousand years ago, where you struggle to survive in a bloody, everlasting conflict between you and the Persians who can’t seem to accept defeat. You can command mighty armies and determine the fates of entire nations with the press of your keyboard and mouse. The Greek map has 5 territories to take over, forest, jungle, plains, tundra and desert. The units there are entirely dependent on the setting. The thick forest and jungle will be crawling with Persian scouts and warriors waiting to ambush you. The flat and open plains will have Persian horsemen ready to run you down. Yikes. Should have gone into the phalanx position earlier… The dry desert will have Tusken raiders, uh I mean Persian scouts preparing to raid your camp. Lastly you will feel Game of Thrones vibes when you go to the final territory, which is the tundra. Be glad we didn’t make you face a horde of frozen zombies, and a couple of undead ice dragons. You may have to face a terribly named boss though.
Our game is coded on Visual Studio Code. You can program in many languages like JavaScript, C++, and more. In order to launch it, we use GitHub to keep out progress and data. While coding our game, we have learned many things, such as how to make a button or switch between different codes. We created a code called “objects” so that we can add health, damage, and all of that sort of things to the soldiers, certain buttons can be created, move the soldiers into different grids like chess, etc. The first level (Stone Age) is not the greatest. It doesn’t have a grid system and the attack isn’t the greatest. The 3rd level (Medieval) is a lot better. The details are better than the first one. For the 2nd level (Bronze Age) you might want to ask Ian more about this level. Now, every image will be drawn in pixels because we used a website called Piskel. It is free to use and it’s easy to draw in it even with a trackpad. When you finish, you can just download it and it will be in your Finder. If you find the picture, you can drag the image into the VS Studio.
The battle system in our game has a grid system. Moving the soldiers is almost like moving a piece in chess. You get to choose if you want to attack the enemies, buy more soldiers, and move your troops. In the first age (Stone Age) the attack system was a little different. Besides that, everything else has the same attack system. There are many soldiers that you can pick and buy. Each one of them has their own special ability like attacking with an axe, spear, and so on. Using these soldiers can help you defeat the enemies, but the enemies also have their own specialty also. Like chess, you must strategize what you do to defeat the enemy. Be careful what you do because anything can happen. The image below is the code for the grid system.