POC (Proof Of Concept) - Implement basic elements of the Game

[andreagalle]

What we excpect from this task is to have a minimal playable version of The Space Race (aka TSR) videogame, with a menu selection to chose different maps, the ship will just explore without doing anything else. The player can change map pressing the ESC key.

• Menu selection, to navigate and chose different maps (at least 5 maps) : the differentmaps can even change by color only at this point.
• Go back to the Maps selection menu pressing the ESC key
• Spaceship Sprite, just a dummy spacecraft to move around the different mpas to explore.
• Maps exploration (2D), the spaceship move around a given map and is always at the center (see related issue #21 ) : the different maps are just explored at this stage.
• Constant velocity of the spaceship, constant orientation : the spaceship can move backward and towars left/right , but is lways pointing to the same direction at this point, we will implement the spaceeship rotation ASAP together with the gun functionality (see related issue #23 )

[andreagalle]

@ben-vanzyll-temple this is the first issue you will work on (for the Final Project) during this first Iteration (actually the 2nd, that concludes the 6th March).

By this end you will have to push on your branch the code to implement this task and of course, before, we will discuss here all the viable solutions, together.

Me and @dario-abbondanza prepared for you some useful resources, we will share with you here (on GitHub) together with additional exaplanations.

This will be the primary way we will communicate here to work together.

[dario-abbondanza]

Following Andrea's comments, I would suggest @ben-vanzyll-temple to take the following steps:

1. Random maps can be generated using this program: https://deep-fold.itch.io/space-background-generator . Maps backgrounds must be 1500x1500 pixels. You can find an example in the "/projects/the_space_race/" directory within the lab-sessions branch. There is also a spaceship image you can use, or you can create a new one using free tools you find online (see additional resources below).
2. Menu selection should allow the possibility of switching maps.
3. Images can be loaded using the pygame.image.load function, and can be transformed and resized using the pygame.transform.scale function. Look at the pygame documentation to understand how to use them. Ideally, we would like to zoom in the background and zoom out the spaceship, so that it appears as a small object in a very large environment.
4. The player should be able to move the spaceship sprite on top of the background by pressing the arrow keys. To do that, I would suggest using the pygame.key.get_pressed function to handle key events and the pygame.Surface.blit to display the spaceship in the appropriate position. For an example, you could have a look at the code in "/lab-sessions/scrolling_background" in the lab-sessions branch.
5. To display the zoomed background, you can use the blit function with an additional argument, specifying the region to be cropped and displayed. Have a look at the documentation for details.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

• To generate planets sprites, we could use this program: https://deep-fold.itch.io/pixel-planet-generator
• Free assets for The Space Race project can be found here: https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-space