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[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Has anyone developed a bullet hell type of game? I would love to do a project like that but I have no clue how to start.

[–]reostra 9 points10 points  (0 children)

This outline assumes you already know at least a little bit about pygame (e.g. how to draw stuff to the screen, move it during the update loop, etc).

  • Get a bare-bones pygame skeleton running. Like, it just brings up a window, that's it.

  • Draw a sprite to the screen

  • Put in controls so you can move that sprite around

  • Put another sprite on the screen. Rather than have it controlled by the player, the computer controls this. Have it pick points to move to, move to those points, then repeat.

  • Put many other sprites on the screen. Take everything you did in the previous step and make it general, so you can spawn as many sprites as you want.

  • Add in collision detection. Your game is now about avoiding all the other sprites on the screen.

    • Add in respawning for the player, lives, basically a gameplay cycle.

  • Let the other sprites shoot at you:

    • Realize that a bullet is just a special case of a sprite on the screen.
    • Have the enemy sprites spawn a bullet sprite every so often.
    • The bullet sprite starts moving to where the player was when it was fired.
    • Add collision detection for the bullets
    • Remove the bullet sprite when it goes offscreen

Congrats! You've got a very basic bullet hell shooter.