Creating Apps in Kivy

Chapter 10. Writing a Simple Mobile Game

Now that you’ve written and deployed your first mobile app, I hope you’re raring to build another one! I actually recommend that your second mobile application be something that you develop on your own. However, once you’ve dabbled in that for a bit, come back here, and I’ll show you how to build a rather silly game. One of the primary complaints about Kivy is that the widgets don’t integrate well with the “native” look and feel on the various platforms on which it runs. This complaint rarely applies to gaming, and Kivy is a perfect mobile-gaming platform.

In this chapter, I’ll describe a simple idea for a game that has been bouncing around in my head. I’ll start you on some basic touch interaction and graphics. In the next chapter, you’ll look at adding enemies and scoring to the game. Finally, you’ll finish the game by adding graphic textures.

Designing a Game

Over the course of my career, I’ve implemented a few games, but I don’t consider myself a game designer. In fact, I can’t promise that the game you are about to implement is going to be fun or even playable. However, the legendary Flappy Bird^[1] game tells us that in the mobile space, games don’t have to be fun or playable to be successful!

The gameplay I have in mind is, I hope, quite simple, both to explain and to implement. Here’s the interaction that I’m picturing:

• An entity (representing your character, the “good guy”) in the center of the screen grows when the player touches the ...