PYTHON
Coding the arcade classic Space Invaders
Calvin Robinson will always extend the hand of friendship – unless menacing aliens are descending from the skies, in which case… blast ‘em!
OUR EXPERT
Calvin Robinson is a former assistant principal and computer science teacher and has a degree in Computer Games Design and Programming.
An intro screen, ready for the game to begin.
S pace Invaders is probably the most famous space shooter of all time, released way back in 1978 for arcades. Originally called Uchu ¯ Shinryaku-sha in Japan, Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter, and paved the way for shooting games as a new genre. The idea being that the player controlled a space ship at the bottom of the screen, and it was their job to move left and right to avoid enemies, while shooting rockets up the screen to destroy them. Nice and simple fun, so let’s have a go at creating our own take on this retro classic.
We’ll be using Python to code our game, since it’s one of the most versatile, accessible high-level programming languages on the market. Python is completely free and should be installed on most distros by default. However, there are multiple versions of Python, so let’s make sure we’re running the correct version by launching a terminal and typing sudo apt-get install python3 if you’re on a Debian based distro. For other distributions, check your software download tool.