Welcome to Python Game Programming By Example. As hobbyist programmers or professional developers, we may build a wide variety of applications, from large enterprise systems to web applications made with state-of-the-art frameworks. However, game development has always been an appealing topic, maybe simply for creating casual games and not just for high-budget AAA titles.
If you want to explore the different ways of developing games in Python, a language with clear and simple syntax, then this is the book for you. In each chapter, we will build a new game from scratch, using several popular libraries and utilities. By the end of this book, you will be able to quickly create your own 2D and 3D games, and have a handful of Python libraries in your tool belt to choose from.
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.
The projects covered in this book assume that you have installed Python 3.4 on a computer with Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. We also assume that you have included pip during the installation process, since it will be the package manager used to install the required third-party packages.
If you have ever wanted to create casual games in Python and you wish to explore the various GUI technologies that this language offers, then this is the book for you. This title is intended for beginners in Python with little or no knowledge of game development, and it covers step by step how to build seven different games, from the well-known Space Invaders to a classical 3D platformer.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "For instance, on Ubuntu, you need to install the python3-tk package."
A block of code is set as follows:
new_list = []
for elem in collection:
if elem is not None:
new_list.append(elem)Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ python –-version Python 3.4.3
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Make sure that you check the Tcl/Tk option to include the library."
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You can also contact the authors directly. Alejandra Rodas de Paz, author of Chapters 1 to 6, can be reached at <[email protected]>. Joseph Howse, author of Chapter 7, can be reached at <[email protected]>, and answers to common questions can be found on his website, http://nummist.com/opencv.