Making Games with Python & Pygame

[Pages:365]Making Games with Python & Pygame

By Al Sweigart

Copyright ? 2012 by Albert Sweigart Some Rights Reserved. Making Games with Python & Pygame) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You are free:

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ISBN (978-1469901732) 1st Edition

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For Calvin Chaos

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Who is this book for? i

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?

When you get down to it, programming video games is just about lighting up pixels to make pretty pictures appear on the screen in response to keyboard and mouse input. And there are very few things that are as fun. This book will teach you how to make graphical computer games in the Python programming language using the Pygame library. This book assumes you know a little bit about Python or programming in general. If you don't know how to program, you can learn by downloading the free book Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python from . Or you can jump right into this book and mostly pick it up along the way. This book is for the intermediate programmer who has learned what variables and loops are, but now wants to know, What do actual game programs look like? There was a long gap after I first learned programming but didn't really know how to use that skill to make something cool. It's my hope that the games in this book will give you enough ideas about how programs work to provide a foundation to implement your own games. The full text of this book is available in HTML or PDF format at .

-Al Sweigart

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ABOUT THIS BOOK

Hello! This book will teach you how to make graphical computer games with the Pygame framework (also called the Pygame library) in the Python programming language. Pygame makes it easy to create programs with 2D graphics. Both Python and the Pygame framework can be downloaded for free from and . All you need is a computer and this book to begin making your own games.

This book is an intermediate programming book. If you are completely new to programming, you can still try to follow along with the source code examples and figure out how programming works. However, it might be easier to learn how to program in Python first. Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python is a book that is available completely for free from . That book teaches programming by making non-graphical, textbased games for complete beginners, and also has a few chapters about using the Pygame library.

However, if you already know how to program in Python (or even some other language, since Python is so easy to pick up) and want to start making games beyond just text, then this is the book for you. The book starts with a short introduction to how the Pygame library works and the functions it provides. Then it provides the complete source code for some actual games and explains how the code works, so you can understand how actual game programs make use of Pygame.

This book features seven different games that are clones of popular games that you've probably already played. The games are a lot more fun and interactive than the text-based games in Invent with Python, but are still fairly short. All of the programs are less than 600 lines long. This is pretty small when you consider that professional games you download or buy in a store can be hundreds of thousands of lines long. These games require an entire team of programmers and artists working with each other for months or years to make.

The website for this book is . All the programs and files mentioned in this book can be downloaded for free from this website, including this book itself. Programming is a great creative activity, so please share this book as widely as possible. The Creative Commons license that this book is released under gives you the right to copy and duplicate this book as much as you want (as long as you don't charge money for it).

If you ever have questions about how these programs work, feel free to email me at al@.

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About This Book iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Who is this book for? ........................................................................................................................ i About This Book..............................................................................................................................ii Chapter 1 ? Installing Python and Pygame ...................................................................................... 1

What You Should Know Before You Begin................................................................................ 1 Downloading and Installing Python............................................................................................. 1 Windows Instructions .................................................................................................................. 1 Mac OS X Instructions................................................................................................................. 2 Ubuntu and Linux Instructions .................................................................................................... 2 Starting Python............................................................................................................................. 2 Installing Pygame......................................................................................................................... 3 How to Use This Book................................................................................................................. 4 The Featured Programs ................................................................................................................ 4 Downloading Graphics and Sound Files...................................................................................... 4 Line Numbers and Spaces............................................................................................................ 4 Text Wrapping in This Book ....................................................................................................... 5 Checking Your Code Online........................................................................................................ 6 More Info Links on ........................................................................................... 6 Chapter 2 ? Pygame Basics.............................................................................................................. 7 GUI vs. CLI ................................................................................................................................. 7 Source Code for Hello World with Pygame ................................................................................ 7 Setting Up a Pygame Program ..................................................................................................... 8 Game Loops and Game States ................................................................................................... 10 pygame.event.Event Objects ........................................................................................... 11 The QUIT Event and pygame.quit() Function .................................................................. 12 Pixel Coordinates ....................................................................................................................... 13

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A Reminder About Functions, Methods, Constructor Functions, and Functions in Modules (and the Difference Between Them) .................................................................................................. 14 Surface Objects and The Window ............................................................................................. 15 Colors......................................................................................................................................... 16 Transparent Colors..................................................................................................................... 17 pygame.Color Objects.......................................................................................................... 18 Rect Objects ............................................................................................................................... 18 Primitive Drawing Functions ..................................................................................................... 20 pygame.PixelArray Objects.............................................................................................. 23 The pygame.display.update() Function ...................................................................... 24 Animation .................................................................................................................................. 24 Frames Per Second and pygame.time.Clock Objects ....................................................... 27 Drawing Images with pygame.image.load() and blit() ............................................ 28 Fonts........................................................................................................................................... 28 Anti-Aliasing.............................................................................................................................. 30 Playing Sounds........................................................................................................................... 31 Summary .................................................................................................................................... 32 Chapter 3 ? Memory Puzzle .......................................................................................................... 33 How to Play Memory Puzzle ..................................................................................................... 33 Nested for Loops ..................................................................................................................... 33 Source Code of Memory Puzzle ................................................................................................ 34 Credits and Imports.................................................................................................................... 42 Magic Numbers are Bad ............................................................................................................ 42 Sanity Checks with assert Statements................................................................................... 43 Telling If a Number is Even or Odd .......................................................................................... 44 Crash Early and Crash Often! .................................................................................................... 44 Making the Source Code Look Pretty........................................................................................ 45 Using Constant Variables Instead of Strings ............................................................................. 46 Making Sure We Have Enough Icons ........................................................................................ 47 Tuples vs. Lists, Immutable vs. Mutable ................................................................................... 47

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