Start Your Game

Part of the Projects section of Coddy's Pygame journey. Lesson 30 of 31.

You have made a game of every kind in this journey: falling blocks, a space shooter, a runner, a platformer, Snake, Pong and a dungeon. Now make your own. Every one of them followed the same plan:

A window and the game loop: events, update, draw, flip, tick.
Something the player moves with keys.
Something that moves by itself: falling blocks, a ball, a snake, a slime.
A rule that ends the game: a collision, a score, a timer.
Text that tells the player how they are doing.

Pick an idea. A spaceship that dodges asteroids. A car that drives between lanes. A cat that catches fish. Your whole toolbox is open: pictures from assets/images, sounds and music, game states, a text map for each level. Shapes work too: a rectangle can be anything once it moves like that thing.

This lesson is steps 1 and 2. The example on the Solution tab is Rock Dodge, a small game drawn with shapes, where a blue paddle will dodge falling rocks.

Challenge

Easy

Start your game:

Give the window your game's title, and a size of at least 320 by 240.
Add a player the arrow keys move, kept inside the window. Draw it as a picture from assets/images or as a shape: both pass.

Any game passes: the checks only look for a window, a player that moves when an arrow is held, and a loop that ends when the window closes.

Try it yourself

import pygame

pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((480, 360))
pygame.display.set_caption("My Game")
clock = pygame.time.Clock()

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

    screen.fill((30, 30, 46))
    pygame.display.flip()
    clock.tick(60)

pygame.quit()

All lessons in Projects

Practice on your own: Pygame playground