Flappy Bird, the Reward Update

Objectives

  • Read and understand all of the Flappy (Fifty!) Bird source code from Lecture 1.
  • Influence the generation of pipes so as to bring about more complicated level design.
  • Give the player a medal for their performance, along with their score.
  • Implement a pause feature, just in case life gets in the way of jumping through pipes!

Getting Started

Download the distro code for your game from cdn.cs50.net/games/2020/fall/assignments/1/assignment1.zip and unzip assignment1.zip, which should yield a directory called assignment1.

Then, in a terminal window (located in /Applications/Utilities on Mac or by typing cmd in the Windows task bar), move to the directory where you extracted assignment1 (recall that the cd command can change your current directory), and run

cd assignment1

Flapping Your Wings

Your second assignment won’t be quite as easy as last week’s, but don’t worry! The pieces, taken one at a time, are still quite bite-sized and manageable and will mainly be a recap of what we’ve covered thoroughly in lecture leading up to this point :) For a refresher on LÖVE2D, as well as some helpful links for getting started, do just visit the following:

https://love2d.org/

https://love2d.org/wiki/Getting_Started

Be sure to watch Lecture 1 and read through the code so you have a firm understanding of how it works before diving in! In particular, take note of where the logic is for spawning pipes and the parameters that drive both the gap between pipes and the interval at which pipes spawn, as those will be two primary components of this update! You’ll be making some notable changes to the ScoreState, so be sure to read through that as well and get a sense for how images are stored, since you’ll be incorporating your own! Lastly, think about what you need in order to incorporate a pause feature (a simple version of which we saw in lecture!). And if we want to pause the music, we’ll probably need a method to do this that belongs to the audio object LÖVE gives us when we call love.audio.newSource; try browsing the documentation on the LÖVE2D wiki to find out what it is!

Specification

  • Randomize the gap between pipes (vertical space), such that they’re no longer hardcoded to 90 pixels.
  • Randomize the interval at which pairs of pipes spawn, such that they’re no longer always 2 seconds apart.
  • When a player enters the ScoreState, award them a “medal” via an image displayed along with the score; this can be any image or any type of medal you choose (e.g., ribbons, actual medals, trophies, etc.), so long as each is different and based on the points they scored that life. Choose 3 different ones, as well as the minimum score needed for each one (though make it fair and not too hard to test :)).
  • Implement a pause feature, such that the user can simply press “P” (or some other key) and pause the state of the game. This pause effect will be slightly fancier than the pause feature we showed in class, though not ultimately that much different. When they pause the game, a simple sound effect should play (I recommend testing out bfxr for this, as seen in Lecture 0!). At the same time this sound effect plays, the music should pause, and once the user presses P again, the gameplay and the music should resume just as they were! To cap it off, display a pause icon in the middle of the screen, nice and large, so as to make it clear the game is paused.

Errata

None.

How to Submit

If you don’t already have it installed, install submit50 by running pip3 install submit50. Then, execute the below, logging in with your GitHub username and password when prompted. For security, you’ll see asterisks (*) instead of the actual characters in your password.

submit50 games50/assignments/2020/fall/flappy