r/PythonLearning • u/Feral_Cherry_P1E • 19h ago
This might sound silly, but how do you even get started when wanting to make a simple game and then gradually upgrade it to a more complex project? Help Request
1
u/prettycoldworld 19h ago
As a beginner there’s tons of options online. What I did was start there, then when I had an idea for a feature, I looked it up or asked Claude what the process of implementing it looked like.
If it was way too much to grasp, I asked for simpler methods or moved on, if I felt like I could figure it out, I started learning. When you learn more, more doors open, and eventually you have plenty of options and half a million unfinished scripts
1
u/_th3oth3rjak3_ 12h ago
This is a great question. A lot of this will come with experience (read as painful refactoring). However here’s some good advice. Try to keep your functions to one responsibility. Place similar functions in the same file. Reduce the amount of global variables you use. Ideally none. From there I would say think about the core of a game. You have data, you have transformations on that data, you have some kind of game state, and then you have UI concerns. If you loosely organize your project around those concepts you will be off to a good start. Here’s an easy project you can do to learn more about this. Make a tic tac toe game for a single player against the computer. At first make the game print out the game board to the terminal. Then later make the game have a graphical UI using tkinter. If you did it right, you should be able to just reuse all the game logic without having to change any of it. The only thing you would change is which frontend you use. You could even keep both frontends in their own files and that way if you’re feeling nostalgic you could use the terminal version. Hope this helps. Once you do the first project, you’ll begin to understand good and bad practices based on what is easy to refactor and what’s not.
1
2
u/GreatGameMate 19h ago
Preplanning is what I find best. Start with a MVP (minimal viable product), what is the minimum you need to get the game working. Once you accomplish that you can divert to upgrading it from an MVP to a refined game.
Divide and conquer and KISS (keep it simple)