Book Image

Python Game Programming By Example

By : Alejandro Rodas de Paz, Joseph Howse
Book Image

Python Game Programming By Example

By: Alejandro Rodas de Paz, Joseph Howse

Overview of this book

With a growing interest in learning to program, game development is an appealing topic for getting started with coding. From geometry to basic Artificial Intelligence algorithms, there are plenty of concepts that can be applied in almost every game. Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language. It provides constructs intended to enable clear programs on both a small and large scale. It is the third most popular language whose grammatical syntax is not predominantly based on C. Python is also very easy to code and is also highly flexible, which is exactly what is required for game development. The user-friendliness of this language allows beginners to code games without too much effort or training. Python also works with very little code and in most cases uses the “use cases” approach, reserving lengthy explicit coding for outliers and exceptions, making game development an achievable feat. Python Game Programming by Example enables readers to develop cool and popular games in Python without having in-depth programming knowledge of Python. The book includes seven hands-on projects developed with several well-known Python packages, as well as a comprehensive explanation about the theory and design of each game. It will teach readers about the techniques of game design and coding of some popular games like Pong and tower defense. Thereafter, it will allow readers to add levels of complexities to make the games more fun and realistic using 3D. At the end of the book, you will have added several GUI libraries like Chimpunk2D, cocos2d, and Tkinter in your tool belt, as well as a handful of recipes and algorithms for developing games with Python.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
8
Index

NumPy installation


To use the particle system support of cocos2d, it is necessary to install NumPy, a Python package used to operate with large arrays and matrices in an efficient way. Since it contains several C modules, it might be difficult to install it on Windows systems because you might not have the appropriate compiler.

You can download the official binaries for Windows and Mac OS X from the NumPy site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/files/NumPy/1.9.2/.

Another option is to download the unofficial compiled binaries from Christoph Gohlke's website at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#numpy. Here, the packages are uploaded as .whl files. This is the extension of the wheel format and can be installed with pip:

$ pip install numpy‑1.9.2+mkl‑cp34‑none‑win32.whl

In both cases, remember to install the binaries for Python 3.4, since the versions for Python 2.7 and 3.3 are available for download as well.

You can check whether the installation was successful by running this...