What this book covers
Chapter 1, Hello, Pong!, details the required software, its installation, and the basic syntax of Python: data structures, control flow statements, object orientation, and so on. It also includes the first game of the book, the classic "Hello, world" game.
Chapter 2, Cocos Invaders, introduces the cocos2d game engine and explains how to build a game similar to Space Invaders to put this knowledge into practice. Here, you learn the basics of collisions, input handling, and scene setup.
Chapter 3, Building a Tower Defense Game, is where you learn to develop a full-fledged game with cocos2d. This game includes some interesting components, such as a HUD and a main menu.
Chapter 4, Steering Behaviors, covers seemingly intelligent movements for autonomous characters. You will be adding these strategies gradually, in different levels of a basic game built with particle systems.
Chapter 5, Pygame and 3D, presents the foundations of 3D and guides you through the basic structure of an OpenGL program.
Chapter 6, PyPlatformer, is where you develop a 3D platformer game with all the techniques learned in the previous chapter.
Chapter 7, Augmenting a Board Game with Computer Vision, introduces the topic of computer vision, which allows software to learn about the real world via a camera. In this chapter, you build a system to analyze a game of checkers (draughts) in real time as players move pieces on a physical board.