The Wiggleface Game Engine

Wiggleface is a silly game engine created as an in-class activity for my students. It gives you access to 16x16 wiggling pixels with a restricted palette of 8 colors running at 30 FPS.

See rainbow.py, animations.py, or snake.py for example usage. Needs pip install pygame. Play the examples like python3 snake.py.

Using Wiggleface

You only need wiggleface.py. A game can be created by supplying the engine with two functions, like so:

from wiggleface import *
w = wiggleface()
def init():
    pass
def update():
    pass
w.start(init, update)

When you call w.start(), it will execute your init() once and then will execute update() each frame until the game ends.

To draw to the screen, set w.grid[x][y] with a tuple containing a value between 0 and 7 representing the color and a boolean for whether the pixel should wiggle or not. The palette could be found here. For example: w.grid[3][8] = (2,True) will set the pixel at (3,8) to be orange and wiggling.

You can output a single line of text below the grid of pixels by setting w.text. It is useful for displaying the score or short messages to the player.

The number of frames elapsed is stored in w.time and can be used for timing.

For input, the state of keys are stored in w.keys as a boolean and are updated each frame automatically. Access these using the predefined key constants, like w.keys[w.Key_Left].

A few helper functions exist for setting all of the pixels: fill(c,m), fillColor(c), and fillWiggle(m).

<img src="https://github.com/AZHenley/wiggleface/blob/main/snake.png" height="400" width="400" >