I decided I would have a go at building a game using Python and pygame, and I chose the 1980's arcade classic, Arkanoid.

I've always enjoyed breakout-type games which are addictive and satisfying to play, and Arkanoid with its varying brick layouts, powerups and enemies adds some extra fun and depth to both the gameplay and code design.

Being new to pygame, I started out by reading the tutorials, one of which helpfully uses Pong as an example. This enabled me to get a headstart with the basic paddle and ball concepts which I was then able to build upon.

This implementation of Arkanoid is still work in progress. The following sequences of the first 4 levels give you an idea of how it looks.

This fork extends the original four-round game with the following changes.

The original game was authored for a fixed 600×800 window. Every on-screen offset, font size, gap and surface dimension in the codebase has been expressed against that reference resolution and routed through a new Layout class in arkanoid/game.py that uniformly scales and centres the play area at runtime. Changing DISPLAY_SIZE in that file is now the only thing required to retarget the game at any other resolution.

The default resolution is 1920×1080 (Full HD), so the game runs fullscreen-ish on a typical desktop monitor.

A new arkanoid/gamepad.py module wraps pygame.joystick and exposes a small object that the rest of the game can talk to without needing to know about pygame events directly. Standard XInput / DirectInput controllers (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, generic pads) all work out of the box.

The paddle listens to the left analog stick and the D-pad with a configurable deadzone, and a separate _gamepad_active flag means the keyboard and the gamepad can be used interchangeably on the same run - whichever input is currently deflected wins, and the other input is preserved in the background rather than being clobbered. The catch (C) and laser powerups both honour the gamepad's A button, so a controller-only player can fire the laser and release caught balls without ever touching the keyboard.

See Controls below for the full button mapping.

Three new rounds have been added on top of the upstream four (and the existing round 5).

Arkanoid runs on Python 3 and requires pygame, plus a few system-wide dependencies.

Install virtualenv if not already installed:

sudo apt install virtualenv

Create a virtualenv, with python 3 as the default python version:

virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 environments/arkanoid

Activate the virtualenv:

source environments/arkanoid/bin/activate

Install the system-wide dependencies for python3-dev:

sudo apt install python3-dev

Install the system-wide build dependencies for pygame:

sudo apt build-dep python-pygame

NOTE: If the above command generates a message saying E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list, then edit /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment the lines that start deb-src. Save the file, then run sudo apt update. Now re-run the previous "build-dep" command.

Install other system-wide dependencies:

sudo apt install libfreetype6-dev mercurial

(mercurial is needed for building pygame from source)

Clone the arkanoid project:

git clone https://github.com/wkeeling/arkanoid.git

Install the project specific dependencies (will build pygame from source):

cd arkanoid; pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the game:

python arkanoid.py

By default the game opens a 1920×1080 window; change DISPLAY_SIZE near the top of arkanoid/game.py to run at any other resolution. All UI elements scale automatically.

• Left / Right arrows - move the paddle
• Space - fire the laser (when the laser powerup is active) and release caught balls
• 1-8 - on the start screen, jump straight to the matching round
• Enter - start the game from the start screen
• Esc - quit

Any standard XInput / DirectInput controller works (Xbox 360/One, PS3/PS4, generic pads). The wrapper applies a 0.25 deadzone on the left stick so the paddle does not drift when you take your finger off.

• Left stick / D-pad - move the paddle
• A / Cross (button 0) - fire the laser (when the laser powerup is active) / accept the highlighted level on the start screen / start the game
• B / Circle (button 1) - release the ball from the paddle at the start of a round (analog of pressing Space when the ball is on the paddle)
• Start (button 7) - start the game (alternative to A on controllers that expose a dedicated Start button)

If no controller is connected the gamepad wrapper reports a centred stick and no button presses, so the keyboard is the only input source and the rest of the game does not need to special-case the "no controller" case.

• The Spriters Resource for the majority of the graphics.
• Positech Games for the enemy explosion graphics.
• Geronimo for the Generation font used in the game.
• Pixel Sagas for the Optimus font used in the game.
• pygame-text for text drawing functions.
• Taito Corporation for the original Arkanoid game.

Will Keeling (original); Q2ckerr: gamepad support, resolution scaling and levels 6-8 added in this fork.