Open a Window

Lesson 1 of 41 in Coddy's Make Games with Pygame course.

In this course you write a whole pygame program yourself, starting from an empty window. A pygame game opens a window and redraws it many times a second. Each picture is a frame.

The code in the editor is the smallest pygame program that keeps a window open:

pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300))

running = True
while running:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            running = False

    pygame.display.flip()

pygame.init() starts pygame. pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300)) opens a window 400 pixels wide and 300 tall, and returns the surface you draw on.

The while running: loop is the game loop. One pass of it makes one frame. pygame.event.get() hands you what happened since the last frame, such as a key press or a click on the window's close button, which arrives as pygame.QUIT. pygame.display.flip() shows the finished frame.

pygame.display.set_caption("My Game") sets the title at the top of the window. Your games run in the browser here, and the same code opens a real window on your computer.

Challenge

Easy

Get the window ready for your first game.

Change the size in set_mode to (480, 360).
Under the set_mode line, add pygame.display.set_caption("Move the Square").

Press Play: a bigger window opens, titled Move the Square. Then Check.

Try it yourself

import pygame

pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300))

running = True
while running:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            running = False

    pygame.display.flip()

pygame.quit()