How to Make the classic HELICOPTER Game in Python! Complete PyGame Tutorial!

what's up you guys welcome back to the channel in today's video I'm going to show you how to create this complete classic helicopter flying game in Python code using the pi game module we're going to do it from scratch [Music] alrighty so as with every Pi game game that we do Step One is import pygame if you don't have it already installed in your package just go ahead and run pip install pygame and then right in the beginning just do pygame dot in it make sure you spell it right pygame.in it and I'll try to go pretty quick through some of the generic stuff that we do in every video but this is an important step so we do want to put height and width of our screen into a couple variables because we're going to use those in a lot of positions like for drawing the obstacles for the helicopter so we're going to want these in variables and then to actually use them it's screen equals and then pygame dot display and then dot set mode and you just give it width comma height like that okay and then if you're gonna uh want to change the uh caption it's pygame dot Set uh pygame.display dot set caption and then you just put what you want it to be in there and we'll say helicopter in Python just like that okay and then if you're gonna have any text which we are we're going to display the score stuff like that then you want to say font and set this up as pygame dot font with lowercase f dot font with a capital f and I'm just going to use freesands bold.ttf because that uh is a font that comes with most installs but you can import a more fun font file here if you want and then we're going to set up a frame rate which I'll make my frames 60 and then you need a timer so a timer is going to be equal to pygame.time dot clock with a Capital C and that's really all we need for just base project setup now we want to do our main game Loop so we're going to make this variable run and it'll be true initially and we're going to say wall run so until something stops that run variable we want the following commands to happen every time over and over again so first thing we'll do is we'll just uh fill it with a background color and I will use black and then you want timer dot tick at your frame rate so that just controls the speed at which your game uh is gonna move and then we just need to figure out how to get out of that while loop so that's the most important first step when you create a while loop is make sure you don't create an infinite while loop you need to have a way to get out of it and so to do that we'll say four event in pygame.event.get this is the event handler of Pi game that will get everything happening with your computer so Mouse clicks keyboard clicks anything like that and then we'll say if the event that happened uh is equal to pygame Dot and then the specific dot quit command um and if that is true then we'll set run equal to false and then we'll come out of our event handling here and we'll say every Loop we want this pygame.display.flip which just throws every visual element we generate onto the screen and then pygame.quit outside of that while loop so uh while run we're going to do all these things if they hit the quit button in the top right of our window then we'll set run equal to false so it'll come down here and it'll do pygame.quit and that should be all we need to do to get our base window so here you can see we've got a 16 High 1000 wide I tried to go with about the screen size of the classic game but feel free to play around with that um and so the first thing we're going to want to do really is we're going to want to handle generating a random map uh when we boot our game up so we're going to make a variable um that I'll call new map and it's going to be equal to true in the very beginning and it's going to be equal to True any time that uh we restart the game so we'll come right after timer.tick and we'll just say if new map then what we want to do is we want to generate a new board so we'll say all of the rectangles in our board are map rects are going to be equal to a function that we'll call generate new just like this okay and then we're going to set new map equal to false because anytime new map is true we just want to do this once so now we have to take a look at what we're actually going to do with the generate new function and it's not going to be that hard so Define generate new we don't have to pass anything in um and then what we want to return is basically a list of rectangles all right so let's take a look at how we're going to do this first of all uh let's just go ahead and put this Rex list initialized in here um just as an empty list and then let's grab the first height of our first rectangle right so um whatever we want the height of the first top rectangle to be equal to let's get a random value So Random dot Rand end zero to three hundred and you do have to import the random module so you need this import random up there with your import Pi game that should come with your python installs but you can run pip to install it too if you need to okay so that's going to be the first top height that we are going to use and then what we want to say is for I in range and we need to calculate the total number of rectangles that we should have and I actually think the best place to do this is not going to be inside this function I think it'll actually be in our initialization so it's definitely possible that you'll want to play around with these values in your version of the game but basically I'm going to make an empty list of the map rectangles out here but I'm also going to do a little bit of math okay so I'm going to decide how wide in pixels I want each rectangle to be and this is something we can play around with in a second but I'm going to say 10 initially when I was playing around with it that looked pretty good and then the total amount of rectangles we want is going to be equal to the width of our screen floor divided by the width of our rectangle and so floor division is uh is how you get an integer value no matter what so first if for some reason your width was 1001 this would round down to the lowest integer value okay so we're just gonna do that in the beginning so that we can reference it in this function but we can also reference it in other functions if we so choose all right so for I in range total number of rectangles what do we want to do for every rectangle we want to select a top height that is going to be close to the previous top height right because we don't want to make it impossible to get through our Channel we want it to kind of look like a carved continuous path so the new top height will be our random dot Rand int and for this one instead of instead of using the just raw 0 to 300 we want to make sure that it's within I guess plus or minus some spacer that we're going to determine so the smallest value it could be would be top height minus some spacer value and the farthest down it could be would be top height plus some spacer value okay so that'll be one more variable to put up in the beginning and I'm going to put a 10 in here and then once we generate this map and draw it on the screen I'll show you what kind of tweaking like this rectangle width and this spacer value can get you but basically what we're doing is for every rectangle we're going to grab a new height for it that's within plus or minus our spacer value of the previous rectangle that way there's not going to be any huge really bizarre jumps in the uh kind of elevation change but then we also need some limits so we need to say if top height is ever less than zero right so if if for some reason the top height of the first rectangle was five and then the random selection chose 10 minus that so so negative five we don't actually want a rectangle that can go off screen so we want to limit top height equal to zero and then I think a good Gap to have between the top and the bottom rectangle is 300 pixels that's kind of why I did it zero to 300 I know I didn't really touch on where that 300 came from but that's half the screen so uh basically I always want the player to have a gap of 300 to fly through so then we need an LF here that's basically if top height ever gets greater than 300 then we want to set top height equal to 300 and so now you're probably saying like okay that's fine but we've we've kind of done all this talking about the top height and we haven't really used it so now we're going to basically our top rectangle is going to be pygame dot draw Dot rect just like this and then we're going to put it on the screen and you probably saw in the intro uh the classic game is these are just like neon green box so I'm gonna make my neon green to stay pretty true to that but you can definitely play around with color here if you want to um and make them you know blue red whatever you could even make it change colors as the score increased if you really wanted to but now we have to be very careful on the rectangle definition so the X starting position should be I times rectangle width right we're going all the way across the screen I is our index variable in our for Loop and each of them should be as wide as our variable rectangle width and then we want to have the Y starting position these are for the top rectangles remember the Y starting position should always be zero so it's always starting at the top of the screen and then for our oop don't close that yet there we go and then for our goodness excuse me sorry about that uh so that's our X and Y starting position then for our width which is pretty easy it's just rectangle width and then for our height it's actually very easy too it's going to be that top height variable that we just defined um and I'm just going to leave it as a solid rectangle I don't need rounded edges or anything but so this is going to give us a row of rectangles across the top of the screen that will be within our spacer value of the previous ones and this is just going to give us a really cool top uh row and then the important thing to do for the bottom row is just understand that we want like a constant Gap in this case 300 and so we can copy this pygame.draw.rect but we do have to change several things about it so the X starting position that doesn't change but the Y starting position is actually going to be top height so that variable we found plus 300 which is basically our Gap and if you think that you're going to want to mess with The Gap that the player flies through you can make this a variable instead of 300. uh I don't want to mess with that so I'm Gonna Leave It 300 but we can then uh make the rectangle width the same and then for height of this you could do some like complicated math to figure out um you know how high uh the rectangle is and just draw it to the bottom of the screen but actually if you make it too long all it's going to do is draw off the bottom of the screen so I'm just going to use height here uh for convenience but you don't have to like this is going to be more than enough always because basically the longest a bottom rectangle will ever be will be 300 right so you could just get around that and say 300 here I I don't really care it's not going to chew up a bunch of processing power so then you want to add these rectangles to our list because we're going to use them for Collision detection and a lot of other things later on so we want to Rex dot append the bottom racked and then uh this is cool this is saving our rectangle objects to a rectangles list but because this is how we generate a new board we're not actually going to be drawing these onto the screen every iteration of the loop so what we need to do that's all it takes to generate a new board in the beginning but what we need to do is we need to make a function called Draw map that's basically going to draw those rectangles every single iteration of the loop so we'll just make this function draw map and we're going to pass in the map rectangles that we should have just gotten from generate new right and we're going to come right underneath our generate new function and now we're going to make a function called Draw underscore mapped and we pass in our list of rectangles and this is super simple it's just for I in range length of rectangles then what we want to do rectangles then what we want to do is pygame dot draw dot rect on the screen color green and then for the rectangle we're just going to say Rex at I right so we have all these rectangles defined in our Rex list so we're just going through one at a time drawing them on the screen color green and then what I found just makes it look a little bit more professional look a little bit better and help Define the edges is I just chose here to make a dark gray border around the entire screen this is totally an optional step but I do really like the way it looks so it just starts at zero zero it's the full width and the full height and I gave it a frame width of 12. it just it looks good to have a border on this project this is not necessary but okay so this should be everything we need to get the board initially created and randomly generated and then also have it drawn on the screen so let's take a look alright so you can see I've got this kind of lower half slow arcing like curve to it which is pretty good but if I booted up again I should get a totally different board because it's completely randomly generated so let's try it again and now you can see it's up at the top and so now I want to briefly touch on you can kind of see each individual rectangle to the next is not a ton of variation you do get some cool shape but if you want to mess with that a bit then what you change is your spacer variable right so if we said 15 instead and then we booted it up now you can see you get uh occasionally you get bigger steps in it and it can make it a little more challenging and what you'll see here is if we made that spacer like 25 you could get some very big single rectangle jumps and so like if you had two straight that were close to your limit you could change by an entire like 50 and just two so I am going to leave it 10 for now but you can play around with it you could also play around with like rectangle width here so if I made it 20 if I made it twice as wide you can see it's actually kind of a lower def shape you know so if I were even to make this like uh five five wide right you're going to see a lot of really wacky shapes um and you'll see it's sort of just increasing definition in it you could even go down to one and you would get a really spiky kind of path through um right it's kind of like sound files almost um so that's just I wanted to touch on what those variables are really doing for us but I'm going to leave rectangle width at 10 and I'm gonna leave uh spacer at 10 for now okay so now let's go ahead and take a look at what we should do next and I think the next thing to do would be draw the player and then also uh move the player and move the rectangles right so let's go ahead and draw the player and I'm going to use a circular like hitbox for the player and we are going to actually import a helicopter shape a little bit later but for now I'm going to make the player a circle just so we get the player's hitbox so we don't get too caught up in style until we get the functionality working and so for this we're going to make another function called Draw player and something I'm really trying to do more of in projects is uh you really use object oriented programming the way it's supposed to and so break all of these functions even if they're only a few lines a piece out into their own functions rather than stuff them all in the game Loop so all right so we're going to want two new variables for this we're going to want a player X variable which I'll just put it at 100 so it's kind of off of the left edge of the screen and then we want player Y which I'll make 300 just initially it doesn't matter because actually what we're going to do is come down inside our generate new function and we're going to just call that player y as a global so we don't have to pass it in and out but when we Define the top height right here one more thing that I want to do is just Define that player y coordinate as the top height plus 150. and so if you think about we said the player will always have a 300 300 pixel Gap and so this is going to stick the player right in the middle of the Gap when we generate a new board and now this function and this function can officially just be closed while we work on other functions so let's take a look at the draw player function now Define draw player and basically we don't have to take anything in because all we're returning is our player like Circle so the location and hitbox for the player which is just going to be equal to pygame dot draw dot Circle and uh we're gonna put it on the screen I'm gonna make this initial circle white so it's really easy to see against a black background and then for a center point we're just going to give it the player X and player Y coordinates we just came up with and then for radius I'm just going to use 20. so we're in a gap of 300 a radius of 20 might seem like you're giving the player a ton of space but as the speed starts to increase on this game that's actually still going to become very difficult so totally something you can mess with if you want and we will come back to this later and we'll also this is where we'll um draw player hit box as Circle and uh player helicopter image so we're gonna do the player helicopter image but first we're gonna talk about how to use um that hitbox and how to kind of move the player and move the rectangles so uh for now if I just make this we should get a white circle yeah directly in between our starting objects right so you could say that it doesn't really make sense to make the players uh y position in between the first rectangles but in my experience you know putting the player 10 rectangles away there hasn't been a single situation where that uh hasn't been close enough to the original spot so I think that looks pretty good um now let's go ahead and take a look at how to kind of move the player so the classic way to really move the player is uh is with one key that you sort of hold down to get to move up and then you release to move down and it's sort of gravity based and momentum based where the longer you hold it down the faster you'll shoot up and the longer you've released it the faster you'll go down this is similar to like Flappy Bird or Jetpack Joyride I think as far as I know helicopter was practically the first one to do that so what we're going to do to move the player is we're going to make a new variable that we'll call flying so when you're holding the space bar down you'll be given the helicopter some gas and you'll be shooting upward and then when you release the space bar you'll start letting gravity do its thing so we need some new categories in our event handling we need if event actually this uh four event in pygame.event.get we're going to add some new event types so this should probably shouldn't have worked it should be if event DOT type is equal to pygame.quit which I don't know if you guys are attentive or not but you may have noticed up to this point I've been having trouble with the x button um I'm guessing it was because I just said if event is equal to pygame.quit and uh I just answered something I was trying not to panic and uh be like why was the x button not working but that's why and there you go we just learned something live troubleshooting you guys are lucky uh so now we want to to event type equal to pygame Dot and now we want um not Mouse button down excuse me key down so just key down like that and we're going to take a look at what to do with the space bar so we need if event dot key is equal to pygame dot k underscore space okay just like this and if event dot key is equal to k space then we want Flying equal to true all right and now we want to figure out what's the opposite of that if event DOT type is equal to pygame dot key up so you've released the space bar if event dot key is equal to pygame dot k underscore space then flying is equal to false just like that okay pretty easy um pretty simple stuff and all we have to do to use that is basically make a new function obviously underneath uh our draw player that we'll call move player and so for this one we are going to uh basically get back a new y coordinate for the player as well as we want to keep track of the rate of change so our speed in the y direction using a new function that we'll call move player and we need to pass in here obviously the players y uh the current y coordinate as well as the current y speed as well as whether or not we are flying okay so uh we need to make a new variable here obviously called y speed and when the game boots up we'll make it zero so you're not uh going upwards you're not going downwards you're just sitting there and now let's take a look at how to use that so Define move player and let's make sure we get our variables that we said we'd pass in in the correct order so I think we said y position and then our speed and then if we're flying or not and I think we said we need to return our y position and our speed now let's just double check that player y y speed and then whether or not we're flying and we're gonna pass back the Y position and the speed yep so this is actually not that hard all we're going to do is say if flying is active then we want our speed to be plus equals gravity so we'll say that we move upwards in the same speed that we move downwards oops okay and then our y Position will be minus equals speed and then we'll say come on stop fighting me and then we'll say else meaning flying is not true then our speed is going to be minus equals gravity gravity just like that and then our y Position will still be yeah it's it's fighting me on gravity because I haven't made it yet so actually y position minus equal speed is true no matter what it's uh always our y position is always changing you don't have an option in this game to stay stationary you either are going up or down which is actually kind of the challenge of it so we need to make this variable gravity that's also going to be one of the things that kind of controls the difficulty of the game and so you can play around these variables if you want I have found 0.3 to be a uh you have a lot of control it's fairly responsive but you don't have so much control that it's impossible like it doesn't change so rapidly that you can't get a handle on things so now uh that really should be all we have to do so if we boot this up and I'm going to try to oh I went I started by going straight up oh so make sure you have the uh flying equals false to start uh because um you want uh yeah there we go so now if I tap the space key I can kind of get the uh player to hover in place which is kind of fun and if I hold it down I shoot up with more speed and if I let go for a while there's a a pretty significant curve so this is kind of like a little bit of physics-based um you know change of Direction gravity is sort of this acceleration that can change our why speed over time so it's really change in velocity per time which is what acceleration is okay and so actually we're not gonna move the player in the X Direction the way we're going to give the illusion of flying forward is by moving all of the rectangles on the board uh and this is probably going to be the most complicated step in the process and the best part is it's not even that complicated okay so let's take a look at it right below where we're moving the player we're going to want another function that we're going to call uh basically move rectangles okay and so for this we're going to sort of be overwriting our list of rectangles using a function called move Rex move rects and all we're gonna pass in here are gonna be our map rectangles okay so let's come below move player and Define move rectangles and then in here we're still passing in this list of rectangles and we're returning returning the list of rectangles all right so uh what are we gonna do inside of here well we're going to say 4 I in range length of our rectangles list so this is basically saying for every rectangle in our rectangles list we're just going to redefine rects at I equal to and so now the thing about defining a rectangle is that you don't give it color when you just Define it like this you give it X and Y start position and then you also give it width and height so it's going to be Rex at I zero minus a variable we're going to make called map speed and to start I'm just going to make map speed equal to 2 but we are going to make that get progressively faster the higher the score gets when we get to the scoring step but so basically we're taking your X starting coordinate and we're going to move it to the left by the speed of the map but then everything else about the rectangle is going to stay the same so Rex I one and then this is going to always be rectangle width and then this is going to be Rex I3 so we want the rectangle to stay the same vertical height the whole time it's on there um so basically we're not changing anything about the rectangle except its X position and then we need to do sort of some checking to see if our rectangle just got off the map so we're going to say if Rex at i 0 plus the rectangle width um is less than and now we'll say just zero so basically you're all the way off the screen right um then we want to Rex dot pop and uh something to actually be careful about here is we want to pop two rectangles so we want to pop Rex dot pop uh we want to pop both of the first two rectangles because the way we added to these in the generate new list was we added the top rectangle then the bottom rectangle we didn't add all of the top rectangles to one list and the bottom rectangles to another we added the top rectangle then the bottom rectangle but they're in the same X position so this means we want to pop the bottom rectangle and then the top rectangle to make sure we remove the right number of rectangles from our list and then what we're going to do is we're going to select if we did have to do this here uh we're gonna select a new top height top height equal to random dot Rand int there we go um from Rhett's negative two so this is the previous top one right so negative 2 means we're now selecting backwards from the end of the list so negative one is your last element in the list negative two is the second to last element in the list which is gonna be the last top rectangle because the way we have it set up we're always adding a bottom rectangle last but we're going to use the top rectangle to get our new top height okay so top height was three on that rectangle so the options for this new rectangle are basically Rex minus two um three which is the top height minus the spacer or plus the spacer so this is how we're gonna get a continuous board that goes forward um as we as we play the game all right and so now we need to do the same if top height checks uh less than zero and greater than 300 and actually the easiest way to do this is just going to be grab these four lines of code um and then we will actually use very similar uh top and bottom rect code so uh you know you could grab those and try to um modify them but I'm gonna just think through what we're doing now okay so this is actually pretty important we're appending to our rectangles list so we need to put the new rectangle in this list and what it's going to be is that Rex minus 2 plus rect width for starting X position minus two uh sorry zero so Rex minus two zero refers to the previous uh the last top rectangles X starting position so this new rectangle is going to be that position plus the width of one rectangle it's a y starting position will always be zero because it's a top rectangle its width will always be rectangle width and then its height is going to be this top height variable and then we need to also add a bottom rectangle to make sure we keep these kind of standard orders of doing things so we have Rex minus 2 0 and we are going to add to it the rect width the X position doesn't change right and then it's top height plus 300 just like before and then rect width and then I'm just to be consistent I'm going to throw height in here as well and then what we will do here this is actually an okay time to incorporate scoring I guess too so we'll call in the score variable and we'll say any time we've erased one new rectangle and drawn on or two new rectangles I guess and drawn on two new rectangles we'll call that one point so let's go ahead and make a variable score that will just start out equal to zero but we'll say you get a point every time you've moved a rectangle off the screen okay so we haven't put any Collision detection in but just with this function that we just made we should have everything we need uh to get the rectangles kind of moving as the player is flying through them so let's go ahead and boot it up and see if it's working yeah and you can see like map Speed 2 is not very fast but that's kind of to give the player a chance to like initially get their helicopter flying get a feel for the controls and then we're going to want to go ahead and make like Progressive difficulty but the last real game mechanic that's missing is we obviously don't have any Collision detection and this is going to be pretty easy so let's go ahead and sort of take a look at how to do that next so if we come down below our move rectangles function then what we can do is we can create some variable checking like if game is over or if it's not I'll call it active but basically all check Collision needs to tell us is if we are colliding or if we aren't and that'll set this active variable to either true or false so we need to pass in all of the rectangles and we need to pass in the player Circle and I guess we'll pass in active too I'm not sure if we'll need that or not but let's pass it in there in case we need it uh and so now let's come up to our functions and let's just make a new one which is going to be called uh what do we call it check Collision Define check Collision and we are going to pass in here the rects the circle and then also active and we are just going to return whether we should still be active okay and just to briefly touch on you've probably noticed all of my uh functions I give the names inside slightly different names than the name outside that's just because uh pycharm in particular will give you this it Shadows the name active from the outer scope that can create confusion when your code doesn't really know which active it's looking at so I just try to change them up inside the function just wanted to touch on that briefly now what we're going to say is for I in range length of our rectangles right so for every rectangle in that rectangles list top or bottom if our player uh I think I called it Circle if Circle dot Collide rect and this is a really nice function that pygame has built in for its polygons so you can check if our player's circular hitbox collides with the rectangle at and so all you give in here is the rectangle to check for collision with so if it collides with a rectangle we're going to set act equal to false otherwise Act is going to be equal to true so I guess this is the benefit of passing what it's currently Set uh to in here otherwise you would just want something like active equals true right in the beginning but we don't need that okay and so this should be all we need to do to create uh working Collision detection and then to see if it's working we'll just make it to where our if active to where our uh player movement and wrecked uh map movement only work if active is true and so in the beginning obviously we want active equal to True okay so if we did that right then just with that very simple function yeah everything will stop moving when we hit uh a rectangle so obviously the map's not moving very fast and the gaps aren't very big so I could play this forever but if I you know fly up into a ceiling Target it stops the game so that's really cool and that is legitimately the basis of all of this gameplay so now what I think we should do is we should incorporate some of those real like improvements to make this a much more fun game so first let's take a look at basically how to restart the game right so I think if we press uh the enter key or uh it's called the return key in pi game but if you press enter on your keyboard uh while active is false I think we should use that to sort of reboot so we'll say if event dot key in our pygame.keydown logic if event.key is equal to pygame dot k underscore and it's called K return but that's your Enter key okay it's just because old-timey keyboard said return instead of enter there I think it actually goes back to typewriters which is awesome so then we'll say if not active meaning uh if you press the enter key and you've lost so active is false then we'll restart but if you hit the enter key accidentally while you're playing it won't do anything um but then we'll set a few things that new map variable we made in the beginning we'll set that equal to True we'll set active back equal to true we will reset the Y speed so that you're back to neutral and then we'll reset the map speed uh to two or whatever initial value you want it to have and then we'll say if score is greater than high score which we obviously need to make a new high score variable but then we'll set our high score variable equal to score because then the last thing we need to do is we need to clear out our score so this is just a quick simple way to check if we got a new high score every time we restart and so underneath score let's just make another variable high score and we're not doing anything with those yet but this should allow us so like when I boot it up if I was caught off guard and oh okay I died if I hit enter yeah it generates a new map um which is really fun and now I can just sort of keep playing um so okay I've said several times we're going to make it progressively more difficult which is going to be like a big Improvement for um a big Improvement for like replayability and making it fun and challenging to like beat your high score so we're going to Define our map speed as equal to 2 plus the score four divided by and here's kind of an interesting thing where whatever number you put here the bigger you put it um the the longer you'll be able to play before losing because basically us this means every time we score 50 the map's gonna go one faster so if I put a hundred here it would be every time we scored a hundred the map will go one faster so what you'll see when I boot this up is uh just by flying for a little while and surviving the map is going to start moving a lot faster so there it just went to three and then it goes to four and now it's at five uh six but then the thing is every time you get another score up It's Gonna Change speeds even faster because you're obviously clearing rectangles a lot faster so you can play around with this value if you want I found 50 was like just about the right speed for like a lot of challenge but also very fun and rewarding um okay so I'm gonna do that for map speed and then uh I'm gonna put a few things on the screen now so I think we should put the score and the high score and instructions to restart on the screen so let's do screen dot blit of a font dot render and this is ordinarily a two-step process but because these are so simple I'm gonna do it in one line of code and I'm gonna put the score inside of a formatted string uh and then you need to give it the anti-alias argument of true which just Smooths it out and then uh we'll have the text be black which um might seem like a bold Choice since the background is black uh so you could you could change the color of the text if you wanted but when the green blocks are are there it'll look really clear and then when they're not it's okay it's it's kind of fun and honestly that reminds me of the classic look of the game anyways and then so uh we just need to give it an X and Y starting position for the screen dot blit which is a block transfer to actually draw it on the screen so what we did here is we defined pygame font of score with the score variable in it uh color black anti-alias true and then we screened up blit or block transfer draw it onto the screen in position 2015 okay and now we'll also uh font.render another one for high score and I put the score at the top of the screen I'm gonna put the high score at the bottom of the screen just like this and so instead of 2015 I'm gonna go 25.65. um put it pretty close to the bottom and then I'm also going to say if not active so the player knows how to uh screened up so they know how to reboot um we'll say press enter to restart and anti-alias true and color black uh oh I just did screen.blit but I skipped font dot render so a lot of the times in uh projects where I have bigger text or a ton of text I'll do the font dot renders and the screen dot Blitz on different rows just kind of putting it on one for ease of use here and I'm gonna put this pretty close to the middle of the screen at the top of the screen and also at the bottom of the screen so same text just going to draw it in two spots so regardless of whether you were close to the bottom or the top of the screen when you lost this will allow you to see the instructions for restarting and I think that's going to be it for that so let's go ahead and take a look at some of our uh some of our work there so far okay so yeah you can see uh high scores at the bottom regular scores at the top uh you can see now every time we get 50 um you can obviously kind of visually see the map start moving a lot faster um so let's just go ahead and see if I can get to like around a thousand that'll be map will be moving pretty good and then we should get the uh enter command uh yeah there we go okay so press enter to restart that looks pretty good so I'm good with text but uh one thing I know I've said a few times that we want to do is we want to improve the look of the player right so um this game is called helicopter it'd be nice if we could get a good looking helicopter but we did Define like a circular uh hitbox already that'll be really useful so what we're going to do is we're gonna instead of this being a white circle we'll make it a black circle once we're confident that our helicopters drawn in the right spot but so uh let's make a new variable just call it heli uh which is kind of shortcut for helicopter um and then pygame dot we're going to do two things so we're gonna do transform dot scale so this is going to make sure that we scale it to the right size but inside that scale command we're going to do pygame.image dot load and this is similar to the font uh rendering and blending on one line you could do pygame.mage.load and then scale it it's just going to be easier like this so if you've grabbed the code and assets package from my GitHub you'll have this exact helicopter image but if you don't if you have your own helicopter image you just need to play with the scaling until you get one that you feel comfortable with but even though we used a radius of 20 my helicopter image just has a lot of empty space around it so I found 60 by 60 for the scaling really helps bring it down to a good size where the main body of the helicopter sort of works right over top of our Circle here all right so we come down here uh where we have player.draw.circle and that's where we Define the player and we're going to do screen dot blit of our heli image and then for position it's going to be player X and we're actually going to scoot It Back 40 pixels because again the body of the helicopter is 60 wide but we want the hitbox to basically be on the cabin of the helicopter not really the tail so we're going to scoot It Back 40 and then for the Y position we want this this is going to be the top uh part of your image and we don't actually want this to be at the center point we want it to be up a little bit so we'll do player uh y minus 30 and let's go ahead and actually this needs to be coordinates inside of screen.blit just like that okay and so if I boot this up now it might look a little silly because we have a white helicopter with a white circle but what you can see clearly is the circle lines up pretty good with the body of our helicopter but we need that circular hitbox because Pi game is not great with checking collision with images you have to set up kind of complex masking rules so we're going to keep that but we want to be out of sight so change the circle to be black and now you'll have this really crisp looking helicopter and you won't see the circle at all and then when you hit something you'll see the circle a little bit but it really just makes it so that the helicopter is a lot easier to see and it feels pretty fair like it doesn't feel totally broken like oh I didn't collide with anything it does feel like the image is hitting the edges just like that um so that's pretty cool uh I would call that completely done last thing I think I want to incorporate is just in the same way we make the speed increase as we get a higher score I think it's also fun to make our spacer more difficult as we get a higher score so like initially the blocks could only change by 10 per piece right um but it's it's actually fun to make it a second element of like Progressive difficulty would be if also every 100 pixels we made it to where it could be one more so like the spacer definitely increases the difficulty in your game so whatever you start with if you also made it to where the pieces could become more erratic and spread out as you played that's another fun way to incorporate Progressive difficulty so now as I'm flying through here every 50 I'll start to see my helicopter speed up but then every hundred and it's kind of a subtle change but every hundred you might notice your uh path gets a little bit less smooth so that can kind of create some more funky shapes and make it a lot more difficult for the player to fly through really smoothly so yeah you can kind of see now we're up at like a thousand and the shapes are getting really erratic and difficult so speed was increasing which is a big deal but also our shape was increasing okay so we have high score tracking um I've covered in a lot of previous videos how to read and write that high score into a text file so if you are interested in setting up a kind of high scoring that saves when you exit um check out some of my past videos you can leave a comment asking sort of which specific videos uh cover that because on this tutorial I want to keep it pretty short and sweet and give you guys this really cool classic game in literally 138 lines of code like that is awesome we did it in under an hour I had a ton of fun with this game I hope you did too consider leaving a like on the channel subscribing to the channel it helps me out a ton all the support on YouTube's been really fantastic if you really love the content that I make and you want to help me continue producing great content consider checking out the patreon link in the description of the video as well of course all the code and assets for this project are available in a GitHub Link in the description as well and as always thanks for watching and good luck with your code thanks bye