PyGame Basics: Grouping Game Objects

In this guide, we will be taking a look at grouping game objects with PyGame. This is useful because most likely you will want to add or remove objects of the same type. Simply using variables to reference objects with won’t cut it. You might use a variable for assigning an instance of the player, but what if you want to add 20 enemies? Unless you name each one with a number after, it won’t work so well....

October 15, 2019 · 3 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: An Improved Game Loop

In this guide, we will be creating a PyGame game loop with delta time. Using delta time can be very useful in keeping the movement of your game smoother. Essentially with a delta time based game loop, game objects will appear to move at a constant speed even when the frame rate changes. Something like the following is common for a PyGame game loop: self.clock.tick(self.fps) while not self.done: self.update() self.render() To convert this game loop to utilize delta time, change the above code to the following:...

October 15, 2019 · 2 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: Keyboard Input

In this guide, we will take a look at a couple ways to gather keyboard input with PyGame. There are a few ways of grabbing keyboard input. The first way to gather keyboard input is via capturing PyGame events. To check if any arrow keys are pressed down on the current update, you can write: for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == pygame.QUIT: running = False if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN: if event....

October 5, 2019 · 2 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: Mouse Input

In this guide, we will be taking a look at how to utilize mouse input with PyGame. Mouse Position To retrieve the position of the mouse, you can use the following line: mousex, mousey = pygame.mouse.get_pos() Of course, with the above line, you can access the x position of the mouse with mousex, and the y position of the mouse with mousey. Ensure this line is executed within the game loop, either in a dedicated update function, or directly within the loop....

October 3, 2019 · 2 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: Image Effects

In this guide, we will be taking a look at some different image effects you can use within your PyGame. In the examples below, I will be drawing sample images at x: 480 and y: 128. To learn how to position images, you can take a look at this guide of ours. Scaling Images You can scale images with PyGame using the pygame.transform.scale method. This method, like the other methods part of pygame....

October 3, 2019 · 3 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: Drawing Images

In this tutorial, we will be walking through how to draw images with PyGame. Let’s dive right in. In your game file, you should see the set_mode method being called. This method call returns a Surface, which is pretty much just the canvas that we’re drawing to. Make sure that the return value of this method call is being assigned to a variable. I named my variable, display like to so:...

October 2, 2019 · 2 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: Game Loop

In this tutorial, we will be creating the game loop of our PyGame game. By adding the game loop, we can keep our game window from disappearing. If by chance you don’t have a game window yet, you can check out this part of our PyGame Basics series. To create our game loop, we need a clock to set the FPS, or frames-per-second of our game. Under the last line of our game window code, add the following line:...

October 1, 2019 · 2 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: Game Window

In this guide, we will be creating the PyGame game window. If you don’t have a PyGame project setup yet, you can learn how to set one up here. In your main game file, you can add the following two lines to create our game window: display = pygame.display.set_mode((800, 600)) pygame.display.set_caption('My Window Title') When you run the game, you should see a window appear for a couple seconds, then disappear. Take a look at this part of the series, where we add the game loop....

October 1, 2019 · 1 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: How to Setup PyGame

Before we jump into building a game, we will need to setup PyGame. Since PyGame requires Python, we will need to ensure it’s installed first. This tutorial series assumes you will be using Python 3. You can download and install Python 3 from the official website. Installing PyGame If you’re running Linux, ensure the python3-pip package is installed. Once you have Python installed, we can setup PyGame. Open your command prompt or terminal and run:...

October 1, 2019 · 2 min · Jared

PyGame Basics: Introduction

We all know Python is highly flexible. What many don’t know is that you can create awesome games with a library called, PyGame. PyGame is a cross-platform set of game development modules for Python. This series is meant to help you learn the basics of PyGame, and is written so you don’t have to follow every part in order. Think of the PyGame Basics series as a reference, and not necessarily a step-by-step walk-through of each part (though you could read each part in order....

October 1, 2019 · 1 min · Jared