Introduction to PyGame

Welcome to the introduction to PyGame and Python 3 video game programming!

Suggested Requirements for this series

Game creation in any programming language is very rewarding, and also makes for a great teaching tool. With game development, you often have quite a bit of logic, mathematics, physics, artificial intelligence, and other things, all of which come together for game creation. Not only this, but the topic is games, so it can be very fun.

Many times people like to visualize the programs they are creating, as it can help people to learn programming logic quickly. Games are fantastic for this, as your are specifically programming everything you see.

First, you're going to need PyGame!

Installation may vary by operating system. Macs historically have had trouble with PyGame, so you may need to get an earlier version of Python and PyGame.

Nowadays, pip is probably the best method for installing PyGame, since it comes with the latest versions of Python 2 and Python 3.

Once you have that, you're ready to create your very first PyGame instance!

 

import pygame

pygame.init()

Above, we've imported PyGame, which is obviously necessary to make use of the module! Then, we run pygame.init(), which is integral to every single PyGame application that you will ever write. This will initiate PyGame, and allow you to then make various commands with PyGame and our game.

gameDisplay = pygame.display.set_mode((800,600))
pygame.display.set_caption('A bit Racey')

Next, we define our game's display, which is the main "display" for our game. You may also see this referred to as a "surface," as this is basically our canvas that we will draw things to, and the function literally returns a pygame.Surface object. We are saying right now that we want the resolution of our game to be 800 px wide and 600 px tall. Take note that this is a tuple as a function argument. If you do not make this a tuple with parenthesis, then 600 and 800 will be treated as separate parameters and the function will blow up. It's a big deal.

After that, we define our display's "caption." To me, it's more like a title, and is the title of the window. We've decided to call our game "A bit Racey." (tm!)

clock = pygame.time.Clock()

Simple enough, this is a our game clock. We use this to track time within the game, and this is mostly used for FPS, or "frames per second." While somewhat trivial seeming, FPS is very important, and can be tweaked as we will see later. For the most part, the average human eye can see ~30 FPS. It's important to note, however, that this is only a very general statement, since every human eye is slightly different, and the human eye does not process things in "frames." The better way to put it is that after about 30 FPS, people generally cannot tell the difference.

Take that 60 FPS YouTube. Anyway, we can increase FPS to literally speed up the game, or slow them down to slow down the game. This isn't ideal, especially when speeding up FPS, as the entire game loop is run per frame, and might be a massive waste of processing. More on this later though!

crashed = False

while not crashed:

    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            crashed = True

        print(event)

    pygame.display.update()
    clock.tick(60)

Okay, a bit more here. I don't like to separate loops and functions if I don't have to, since it can cause people to get indentation wrong. So, first, we've got a crashed = False statement, which is just a variable that we set initially. Then, we run our "game loop," which will run until we crash. Currently, the only way we're saying crashed = True is if the user exits out of the window, however.

You'll notice here that we have a for loop within this while loop. This is going to be present in most PyGame scripts, where events are constantly being logged. It is shown in the video, but not here, but you can still try it: Try adding "print event" above the if statement. You will see in your console everything you do within the PyGame window. Pretty neat!

After our if statement. you'll see that we run a pygame.display.update. It's important to note the difference between display.update and display.flip. Display.flip will update the entire surface. Basically the entire screen. Display.update can just update specific areas of the screen. That said, if you do not pass a parameter, then update will update the entire surface as well, bascially making flip() pointless for our interests. There might come times when you want to use flip for very specific tasks, however.

The last thing within this while loop is clock.tick(60). Basically, this is how many frames per second we are running. In this case, we are running 60 FPS.

pygame.quit()
quit()

Once we have broken our game loop, we want to run a pygame.quit(). This will end our pygame instance. Then we can run a simple quit(), which will exit Python and the application.

There exists 3 quiz/question(s) for this tutorial. Sign up to +=1 for access to these, video downloads, and no ads.

The next tutorial: Displaying images with PyGame