Code refactoring in a game made with Python and pygame

Question

As I kept building my game, I started to notice that I was putting all the methods in the main class and it got too big and hard to follow. I started to refactor it into multiple modules / classes and for example I created a new module called 'game_collisions' and a class named CollisionManager, and in that class I moved all collision related methods from the main class. This is the class:

class CollisionManager:
"""The Collision Manager class manages collisions between game entities like
ships, aliens, bullets, and asteroids."""
def __init__(self, game):
    self.game = game
    self.stats =  game.stats
    self.settings = game.settings
    self.score_board = game.score_board

And one of the methods for example, is this one:

def check_asteroids_collisions(self, thunderbird_hit, phoenix_hit):
    """Check for collisions between the ships and asteroids"""
    # loop through each player and check if it's alive,
    # then check for collisions with asteroids and which player collided
    # and activate the corresponding method
    for ship in self.game.ships:
        if ship.state['alive']:
            if collision := pygame.sprite.spritecollideany(
                ship, self.game.asteroids
            ):
                if ship is self.game.thunderbird_ship:
                    thunderbird_hit()
                else:
                    phoenix_hit()
                collision.kill()

In the main class I am instantiating the Manager class like this:

self.collision_handler = CollisionManager(self)

And calling the method like this, passing as attributes the appropriate methods:

self.collision_handler.check_asteroids_collisions(self._thunderbird_ship_hit,
                                                        self._phoenix_ship_hit)

I did this with most of the methods I moved. And now for my question, Is this good practice? Creating the method in the CollisionManager like this, and calling it with methods from the main class as attributes. Can this lead to something bad? As for being readable, to me it looks good enough. I would appreciate any advice.

gamexdifficulty · Accepted Answer · 2023-03-20T20:31:55.703

it's not bad to call methods from a main class. Your code is more readable and doesn't slow down your game because your collision manager attribute is nothing more than a pointer, pointing to some code. In fact, I've been doing it this way for a long time and other people like Coder Space do exactly the same thing. But if you want to learn more about code structures, you can always download games from Itchio or Github to compare them to yours and maybe see what they did differently than you. Here a little example of a base game structur:

import pygame
class Player:
    def __init__(self,game,pos) -> None:
        self.game = game
        self.x = pos[0]
        self.y = pos[1]
    def update(self):
        self.x += 0.1
        self.y += 0.1
    def draw(self):
        pygame.draw.rect(self.game.win,(232,232,232),pygame.Rect(self.x,self.y,32,32))

class Game:
    def __init__(self):
        self.run_game = True
        self.win = pygame.display.set_mode((600,600))
        self.player_list = [Player(self,[0,100]),Player(self,[200,0])]
    def event(self):
        for event in pygame.event.get():
            if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
                self.run_game = False
    def update(self):
        for player in self.player_list:
            player.update()
    def draw(self):
        self.win.fill((32,32,32))
        for player in self.player_list:
            player.draw()
        pygame.display.flip()
    def run(self):
        while self.run_game:
            self.event()
            self.update()
            self.draw()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    new_game = Game()
    new_game.run()

Happy Coding :)

Code refactoring in a game made with Python and pygame

1 Answers1