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
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Book Version 2

If you've downloaded this book from a torrent, it’s probably out of date. Go 

to http://inventwithpython.com/pygame to download the latest version.  

ISBN (978-1469901732)
1st Edition

Email questions to the author: [email protected]

For Calvin Chaos
Email questions to the author: [email protected]
 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 http://inventwithpython.com.
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

http://inventwithpython.com/pygame.

-Al Sweigart
ii http://inventwithpython.com/pygame

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 http://python.org and http://pygame.org. 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
http://inventwithpython.com. That book teaches programming by making non-graphical, text-
based 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 http://inventwithpython.com/pygame. 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
[email protected].

Email questions to the author: [email protected]

 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 http://invpy.com ........................................................................................... 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 

Email questions to the author: [email protected]

 About This Book v

One Item Tuples Need a Trailing Comma ................................................................................. 48 

Converting Between Lists and Tuples ....................................................................................... 49 
The global statement, and Why Global Variables are Evil.................................................... 49 
Data Structures and 2D Lists ..................................................................................................... 51 
The ―Start Game‖ Animation..................................................................................................... 52 
The Game Loop ......................................................................................................................... 52 
The Event Handling Loop .......................................................................................................... 53 
Checking Which Box The Mouse Cursor is Over ..................................................................... 54 
Handling the First Clicked Box ................................................................................................. 55 
Handling a Mismatched Pair of Icons ........................................................................................ 56 
Handling If the Player Won ....................................................................................................... 56 
Drawing the Game State to the Screen ...................................................................................... 57 
Creating the ―Revealed Boxes‖ Data Structure ......................................................................... 58 
Creating the Board Data Structure: Step 1 – Get All Possible Icons ......................................... 58 
Step 2 – Shuffling and Truncating the List of All Icons ............................................................ 59 
Step 3 – Placing the Icons on the Board .................................................................................... 59 
Splitting a List into a List of Lists.............................................................................................. 60 
Different Coordinate Systems .................................................................................................... 61 
Converting from Pixel Coordinates to Box Coordinates ........................................................... 62 
Drawing the Icon, and Syntactic Sugar ...................................................................................... 63 
Syntactic Sugar with Getting a Board Space’s Icon’s Shape and Color .................................... 64 
Drawing the Box Cover ............................................................................................................. 64 
Handling the Revealing and Covering Animation ..................................................................... 65 
Drawing the Entire Board .......................................................................................................... 66 
Drawing the Highlight ............................................................................................................... 67 
The ―Start Game‖ Animation..................................................................................................... 67 
Revealing and Covering the Groups of Boxes ........................................................................... 68 
The ―Game Won‖ Animation .................................................................................................... 68 
Telling if the Player Has Won ................................................................................................... 69 
vi http://inventwithpython.com/pygame

Why Bother Having a main() Function? ................................................................................ 69 

Why Bother With Readability? .................................................................................................. 70 
Summary, and a Hacking Suggestion ........................................................................................ 74 
Chapter 4 – Slide Puzzle ................................................................................................................ 77 
How to Play Slide Puzzle ........................................................................................................... 77 
Source Code to Slide Puzzle ...................................................................................................... 77 
Second Verse, Same as the First ................................................................................................ 85 
Setting Up the Buttons ............................................................................................................... 86 
Being Smart By Using Stupid Code .......................................................................................... 87 
The Main Game Loop ................................................................................................................ 88 
Clicking on the Buttons ............................................................................................................. 89 
Sliding Tiles with the Mouse ..................................................................................................... 90 
Sliding Tiles with the Keyboard ................................................................................................ 90 
―Equal To One Of‖ Trick with the in Operator ........................................................................ 91 
WASD and Arrow Keys ............................................................................................................ 91 
Actually Performing the Tile Slide ............................................................................................ 92 
IDLE and Terminating Pygame Programs ................................................................................. 92 
Checking for a Specific Event, and Posting Events to Pygame’s Event Queue ........................ 92 
Creating the Board Data Structure ............................................................................................. 93 
Not Tracking the Blank Position................................................................................................ 94 
Making a Move by Updating the Board Data Structure ............................................................ 94 
When NOT to Use an Assertion ................................................................................................ 95 
Getting a Not-So-Random Move ............................................................................................... 96 
Converting Tile Coordinates to Pixel Coordinates .................................................................... 97 
Converting from Pixel Coordinates to Board Coordinates ........................................................ 97 
Drawing a Tile ........................................................................................................................... 97 
The Making Text Appear on the Screen .................................................................................... 98 
Drawing the Board ..................................................................................................................... 99 
Drawing the Border of the Board............................................................................................... 99 

Email questions to the author: [email protected]