Making a game using python and pygame

Question

I am making a game using python and pygame and as my game started to grow, in some of my classes the number of instance variables started to get big. Like in the settings class is like this:

class Settings:
"""A class to store all settings for Alien Invasion."""
def __init__(self):
    """Initialize the game's static settings."""
    # Screen Settings
    self.screen_size = (1260, 700)
    self.screen_width = 1260
    self.screen_height = 700
    # game background images
    self.bg_img = pygame.image.load('images/background/space.jpg')
    self.second_bg = pygame.image.load('images/background/space2.png')
    self.third_bg = pygame.image.load('images/background/space4.jpg')
    self.game_over = pygame.image.load('images/other/gameover.png')
    self.pause = pygame.image.load('images/other/pause.png')
    self.fire_sound = pygame.mixer.Sound('sounds/fire.wav')
    self.endless = False
    self.last_stand = False

    # Ships settings
    self.max_hp = 5
    self.thunderbird_hp = 3
    self.phoenix_hp = 3

    # Thunderbolt settings
    self.thunderbird_bullet_count = 1

    # Firebird settings
    self.phoenix_bullet_count = 50

    # Alien settings
    self.alien_direction = 1
    self.max_alien_speed = 4.0
    self.max_aliens_num = 35
    self.boss_hp = 50
    self.boss_points = 2500
    self.alien_points = 1
    self.endless_num = 50

    # PowerUps settings
    self.powerup_speed = 1.5

    # How quickly the game speeds up
    self.speedup_scale = 0.3

    self.score_scale = 4
    self.initialize_dynamic_settings()

    # Player1 controls
    self.p1_controls = ("Player 1:\n"
                        "Movement: Arrow Keys\n"
                        "Shoot: Enter\n"
                        "Ship skin: Numpad 1, 2, 3\n"
                        "Pause: P")

    # Player2 controls
    self.p2_controls = ("Player 2:\n"
                        "Movement: W, A, S, D\n"
                        "Shoot: Space\n"
                        "Ship skin: 1, 2, 3\n"
                        "Pause: P")

My question now is, i should create different classes for different groups of variables and call the classes inside the Settings, o I should just group the variables in different methods in the Settings class?

Answer 1

It looks like you're actually mixing a few unrelated things here. Consider: how many of these are actually settings? That is, how many of these does it make sense for the end user to modify in some way?

• Fields like bg_img and game_over are clearly not settings, but rather constants which are built into the game.
• Fields like powerup_speed and boss_points could conceivably be dynamic (boss_points could be a function which depends on some points-increasing powerup, for example), but the user probably shouldn't be able to change them.

Fields which are not user settings could be part of, for example, an admin settings class/instance (if that needs to exist), or just constants which can't be changed at runtime.

As for solutions for handling lots of values (constant and dynamic) across lots of entities, you probably want to look into entity component systems.

As a side note, screen_size duplicates the information in screen_width and screen_height, so it probably shouldn't exist at all.