Galaga Clone

What it is#

galaga-clone is a Galaga-style vertical shooter I wrote in Python with pygame. One file (galaga.py), ~200 lines, sprite PNGs, and a BGM track bundled in. I was learning game dev at my coding academy (C3 Coding) and this was the capstone-ish project.

There’s also a beta/main.py with restart logic tweaks, and a tutorials/ folder full of smaller pygame exercises — mouse tracking, font rendering, BGM playback — that I worked through along the way.

How it plays#

640×650 window, 60 FPS. You control a ship at the bottom (forces.png), move with left/right arrow keys (3 px per frame, clamped to screen bounds), shoot with space.

Enemies (enemy.png) spawn every 1 second from random X positions above the screen. Each Enermy (yes, that’s how I spelled it in the code) picks a random fall speed (2–6) and horizontal direction, then accelerates downward (dy += 0.1 every frame). They bounce off the left/right walls by flipping dx.

Missiles are not sprites — they’re 6 px wide lines drawn with pygame.draw.line, and each one gets a random RGB color every frame. Very 2020 energy.

Hit an enemy → +1 score, both objects deleted. Enemy reaches your ship → game over overlay (game-over.png), restart button appears. Click restart and you’re back in.

Code structure#

Four classes in one loop:

Class	Job
Enermy	Spawn, move, bounce, collide with missiles
Forces	Player ship — move, draw, fire, collision with enemies
Missile	Fly upward at 5 px/frame, delete when off screen
Button	Hit-test for the restart image

Collision is gloriously manual — nested while loops deleting from lists with index decrements. No pygame sprite groups, no physics engine. Just rects and collidepoint, held together by hope.

The game-over state sets gaming = False, clears enemies, resets score to 0, and waits for a mouse click on the restart button rect at (250, 510).

Assets#

• enemy.png, forces.png — ship sprites with black colorkey
• game-over.png, restart.png — end screen UI
• Forget Me Not - Patrick Patrikios.mp3 — background music (tutorial folder has the pygame BGM loading code)

Honest take#

It’s janky by today’s standards — typos in class names, list mutation in while loops, score resets on game over before you even click restart. But it was the first game I finished end-to-end, and I still remember the satisfaction of getting enemy bounce physics working. The README just says c3coding pygame and points to a sequel in codingPro01/galaga that never really went anywhere.