Automating Android Games with Python: Stick Hero 

Did I win? What game should I do next?

i didn't even know you could pass shell commands to a phone like that, let alone use python for it, thanks for sharing e-man.

Since the guy has to run across the distance of the bridge, if you pass distance as the parameter for sleep you should get a pretty dynamic/accurate result

EM, the creator of Stick Hero wants to know your location.

The stick growth uses an easing algorithm, so at the start it grows slowly and then grows a little faster. That's why you miss on short sticks and very long ones.

The flow of this video feels like the perfect speed for me.

Actually I tried to recreate the script and I found a lot easier to just find the first gap and then the little red box at the center of the second column. It worked fine

Rumor has it... Engineering Man is secretly The Stick Hero

This was INCREDIBLY interesting! Hope you do more stuff like this in the future.

Easier way: Have the exact height for the 'Red box', and start and stop based on the distance till the Red box, without worrying about any Blacks (or even gaps) because the starting position of the Ninja remains the same on the screen.. It's a matter of minor trial and error to calibrate. Great video E-Man !

This is my favorite video of yours. Thanks! Loving python after picking it up lately.

I love the logic used to solve problems. Want to see more videos like this.

The end of loop sleep time could be a function of the distance.

Wow, this was so much fun to see, and so interesting! Thanks! Keep doing similar stuff, I think people will love it!

Sweet and informative, thanks dude! I wanna add to the convo that ISPs will frequently reassign IPs to consumer modems and restarting it (or power events) can result in the WAN IP discussed here changing. This would require updating users and/or dns records.

Woah, this rekindled my interest in coding again. Nice work, EM! I would like to see how you'd do with some bullet hell games like Bullet Hell Monday

This was awesome! Do more stuff like this please! Love your video style too, straight to the point and coding, keep it up :) subscribed!

This is actually an interesting problem-solving in programming to control android. I did same trick for Piano Tile game.

Python is just awesome. Great video! Beyond the scope I know but I'd scan from top-left downwards to get the proper starting location of Y without hardcoding. That would suggest breaking out the transition detection into a reusable function. Furthermore, I feel it's kinda waste if time to store the screenshot on file. Haven't tried the libs in question but if it's possible to screen cap directly inro memory I'd consider it way more neat. Finally it would be interesting to actually clock the time drawing the stick and dynamically adjust the timing along the way to get better accuracy. Of course, that's all overkill for a proof of concept as shown here. However, it does take into account good practices and interesting extensions like reusability and device independent code. I believe the code required to do it wouldn't be too complicated. Again, great video!

This is what I needed for an automation project I have in work, thanks!😊

Engineering Communicated with Unparalleled Clarity 👏🏻

Thank you for that, always looking for Python ideas, you've just gained a sub

Well, this one was super fun! :D Hope to see more videos of this sort! :)

Looking forward to trying this, thanks for the video!

Great and simple approach. It's probably overkill but instead of 'time sleep' in the end we can pull image and as soon as previous is different from current start applying the algorithm.

Stumbled across this while random video hopping on RU-vid. Fantastic - I work with Python daily, and do automation with it. I never thought about applying that to android games. You have a new subscriber here. looking forward to seeing more :)

i know i'm kinda late to the party, but i just found this today. Seems like the sleep command at the end of the loop should be dependent somehow on the length of the previous transition. because a longer gap will take longer to walk across, having a set time interval isn't optimal. alternatively you could put a condition at the beginning of the loop that checks the delta of your transitions to see when the screen scrolling motion stops indicating the character has arrived at the edge of the next platform and the rest of the loop is ready to go, no waiting. Good stuff man. can't wait to see what else you've got in store for me on the channel!

Good job! I would have a diiferent approach on how to find the distance by finding the red square that each column has using the pyautogui that has a function that finds an specific image in the screen and return the center position of that and then do all the math you did.

I am currently learning python, can do some basic stuffs but i enjoy watching what these modules do even though i havent heard most of them !!!

Can you do a tutorial on making a basic Android app? Or go over an introduction to adb and scrcpy?

Maybe the 2.5 seconds for transition could be changed as percentage of gap. Really awesome work! Congrats!!

Awesome! Keep doing! I got an idea before you begin the next game: Show us how to configure your notepad(atom, right?) and the Virtual Android environment. So we can sync :)

I liked the way you did the logic... and Thank you for sharing.

Thanks for sharing, this is really awesome, I had no idea there was a thing called Android Debug Bridge and that you could control it with Python! I am excited to create some tutorials controlling android from Python! Subscribed.

Nice 1-1,5 hours coding task. Including full environment installation (had already only Pycharm). I did it some coding with openCV, as I have experience working with it - and I would assume to code more on that side, anyways. The most difficult one was to detect where the ledge the ninja was standing is *in all situations*. In that sense this is a good task also, that your phone may have different speed with keypress; I had to adjust speed by factor of 0,73. 100 climbs(?) passed already.

It would be interesting if the program would find this percentage on his own by measuring how long it takes to grow the stick a certain distance.

You make it look so easy. Bravo!

Instead of multiplying by .98, you should've subtracted by a constant value. the problem was that the stick doesnt spawn exactly at the start of the gap but a few pixel to the left.

interesting technique and funny to watch, thanks for sharing! :D

Got it working so that he also catches the cherries! Great channel keep it up

I've been searching for a while for a way to automate some stuff on android, i did know about adb and adb shell since i've been rooting for some years now, but damn to be able to use python as well!! that's mind blowing, is there a documentation on shell commands? Have you thought about social media automation?

Great Video. Hope that similar videos are coming soon :)

Give us more! Splendid way to learn more Python!!!

This guy is really awesome 👍👍👍 keep sharing. You motivated me to learn python after watching your videos.

Btw, you can see the coordinates (it's actually the delta/change in touches) from the developer options on your android device

First Cr1tikal and now you. The two Florida men that make Florida a proud state. All jokes aside, I've watched your videos for a little while and I'm a huge fan. Thanks for the videos, man!

You are an inspiration. Thanks for the awesome videos

Great idea! I was thinking about automating few android games my self too. Can you please elaborate more about how to connect the phone and get the adb working? That's the only part this video is missing.

Damn, nice one - python is so fun and easy - I need to learn it.

I think that you can calculate the "line draw" rate, making a first screenshot then press for 1000ms then screenshot again and measure the distance (even using a photoshop or anything else), that would be a solution, I don't know if there are lags when you take screen shot, but in case of not, that would be more accurate measure

Man that's awesome. I wish i could be as good as you are one day. :) happy coding everybody!

Wonderful video !

Vote up, nice video clip, thank you for sharing it :)

This was so interesting. It makes me want to learn how to do this.

Please continue this series.

Please make more of this kind of content

Loved it!!

it's scary seeing u code O.O u make it looks super easy

The sleep-timer could be optimized based on the distance-value, the ninja travels that distance, thus the animation time should roughly be a multiple of the distance-value + a set value.

I have no idea what's going on, but it's super interesting, I'd like to learn to code and Python seems to be able to automate really well!

Wow, this is kinda cool and I didn't know possible with an emulator. Now I have to try to make my own.

Great Video man!, Just a doubt, what you are using to run the game ?

This was great. I am learning from you.

Awesome idea!

I learn a lot from your methodology. Tnx

You could use a distance multiplied by a certain coefficient as sleep time. That way, you could minimize the amount of time the bot waits on shorter distances.

Hi! Really good video. What are you using to emulate the phone device?

Hi Enigeer Man.. as always awesome video :) Can you please make some videos on docker and microservices ?

I liked your video ... That's awesome ❤️

I would really want to see how you automate game like "Summoners War" that would be a challenge ^^

Amazing ... More videos like that ... Something with C too

Taking a screenshot makes sense, but I wish there was a more "live" way of reading screen pixels in general. If you could read pixels as they update you could press the screen until a certain pixel above you turns black, always giving you the right distance.

This is sooo awesome!

hey mate, was wondering what software you use to get the android screen on your pc so you can see coordinates?

very good video!

if you dont want to write the image to your harddrive all the time you can use img = np.array(pil.open(io.BytesIO(image))) with numpy, PIL and io to convert it for image recognition or whatever

Small tip: Its unnecessary to write the image to a file and then open it again to read it. It probably slows the script down by quite a bit, especially with a hard drive (not ssd). Otherwise really solid video man :)

Using the red spot on the top of the pillar as a reference point instead of the beginning of the pillar might help to make the program shorter

Hey, awesome work! Do you know where I learn more about image analysis? Like pillow and maybe stuff to learn computational photography? Thanks in advance!

You should show a sped up clip of your automated game at the end, like an hour of it playing the game all sped up to a minute for us to watch, and if you stick an ad the first 3 seconds in to it then you can most likely get good ad view time, just make sure you have good attention grabbing- remix making music for the sped up clip so it will take their attention before they decide to stick through the ad

Great video. Do you use any specific scrcpy command to view the x and y coordinates?

At least someone is going after scammers. Not the phone company. Not the government. thank you!

Engineer man, nicely done. Q. If the start point is always the same and the height does not change, why not got to the row that contains the target piece, check that row for the red target RGB values and subtract the difference?

Amazing 👏👏👏

Great video thank you 🙂

I couldn't unpack any values from the transitions. Turned out my image[value] was too low. Works now ;)

engineer man is a hero actually.... lets call him e-man

Its pretty fun to watch even though i cant program, i just love how you searching a solution from a problem and implement it on programming languange. i have one same solution (the time/pixel one). I'm thinking "can i learn program(the easy one is okay) only using online IDE on website like hackerank?", Because my mom's laptop is too scary to try to download a thing because her laptop might be become slow and she can't do work on her laptop.

i only did some automation with webdrive using NodeJs, it's possible to "control the screen" like these using NodeJS i have to use python? i see alot of automation stuff with pyhton, why? nice video btw!

Wouldn’t it be easier to search for the red box since the pillars seem to stay at the same y level all of the time?

Use a decompiler to decompile game files determine the real time => distance equation.

this is incredible

Time to add game automator to my resume.

Why not check for the first red pixel then compute the distance ? Amazing video as always EM

Yoooooooo this is sick

Damn this is mindblowing.

@2:15 what shortcut do you use to create IF statements? :p

Maybe this is a stupid question, because I don't know much about this, but would it be a viable approach to check for the right pixel above the ninja to turn black, instead of calculating the time? I can imagine getting screenshots the whole time would be bad for performance, but I wonder if it's possible to just check for one specific pixel. If so, could it be more accurate without losing too much performance?

Awesome 😎

Man this is soooooo... neat....