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Python Game Programming By Example
Python Game Programming By Example

Python Game Programming By Example: A pragmatic guide for developing your own games with Python

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Profile Icon Alejandro Rodas de Paz Profile Icon Joseph Howse
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$19.99 per month
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.4 (10 Ratings)
Paperback Sep 2015 230 pages 1st Edition
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Alejandro Rodas de Paz Profile Icon Joseph Howse
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$19.99 per month
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.4 (10 Ratings)
Paperback Sep 2015 230 pages 1st Edition
eBook
$24.99 $35.99
Paperback
$43.99
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Free Trial
Renews at $19.99p/m
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$24.99 $35.99
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Python Game Programming By Example

Chapter 2. Cocos Invaders

In the previous chapter, we built a game with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) package called Tkinter. Since it is part of the Python's standard libraries, it was easy to set up the project and create the required widgets with a few lines of code. However, this kind of module falls short of providing the core functionality of game development beyond the 2D graphics.

The project covered in this chapter is developed with cocos2d. This framework has forks for different programming languages besides Python, such as C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript.

The game that we will develop is a variant of a classical game, Space Invaders. This arcade was a success of its time, and it has become part of the culture of video gaming.

In this two-dimensional game, the player must defeat waves of descending aliens by shooting them with a laser cannon, which can be moved horizontally and is protected by some defense bunkers. The enemy fire attempts to destroy the player...

Installing cocos2d

In our previous game, we did not use any third-party package since Tkinter was part of the Python standard library. This is not the case with our new game framework, which must be downloaded and installed.

The Python Package Index (also called PyPI) is an official software repository of third-party packages, and thanks to package manager systems, this process becomes very straightforward. The pip is the packaging tool recommendation, and it is already included in the latest Python installations.

You can check whether pip is installed by running pip --version. The output indicates the version of pip and where it is located. This information may vary depending on your Python version and its installation directory:

$ pip --version
pip 6.0.8 from C:\Python34\lib\site-packages (python 3.4)

Since cocos2d is available on the PyPI, you can install it by running the following command:

$ pip install cocos2d

This command downloads and installs not only the cocos2d package but also...

Getting started with cocos2d

As with any other framework, cocos2d is composed of several modules and classes that implement different features. In order to develop applications with this API, we need to understand the following basic concepts:

  • Scene: Each of the stages of your application is a scene. While your game may have many scenes, only one is active at any given point in time. The transition between scenes defines your game's workflow.
  • Layer: Every sheet contained in a scene, whose overlay creates the final appearance of the scene, is called a layer. For instance, your game's main scene may have a background layer, an HUD layer with player information and scores, and an animation layer, where events and collisions between sprites are being processed.
  • Sprite: This is a 2D image that can be manipulated though cocos2d actions, such as move, scale, or rotate. In our games, sprites will represent the player's character, enemies, and visual information, such as the number of...

Creating game assets

We will need a few basic images for our cocos2d sprites. They will be the visual representations of the player's cannon and the different types of aliens.

The following image shows how these sprites can be drawn with an image editor program, with the help of a grid:

Creating game assets

Unfortunately, the usage of image manipulation tools is beyond the scope of this book. There is a wide variety in these programs, and for basic sprites (such as the ones shown in the previous image), you can use MS Paint on Windows systems.

Under the img folder, you can find the different images that we will use in our game. Feel free to edit them and change their colors. However, do not modify their size as it is used to determine the width and the height of the Sprite and its Cshape member.

Tip

Creating your own "pixel art"

There are more advanced applications that can be run on any platform. This is the case of GIMP, an open source program that is part of the GNU project. The sprites used in...

Space Invaders design

Before writing our game with cocos2d, we should consider which actors we need to model in order to represent our game entities. In our Space Invaders version, we will use the following classes:

  • PlayerCannon: This is the character controlled by the player. The spacebar is used to shoot, and the horizontal movement is controlled with the right and left arrow keys.
  • Alien: Each one of the descending enemies, with different looks and scores depending on the alien type.
  • AlienColumn: There are columns of five aliens into which every group of aliens is divided.
  • AlienGroup: A whole group of enemies. It moves horizontally or descends uniformly.
  • Shoot: A small projectile launched by the enemies towards the player character.
  • PlayerShoot: A Shoot subclass. It is launched by the player rather than the alien group.

Apart from these classes, we need a custom Layer for the game logic, which will be named GameLayer, and a base class for the logic that is shared among the actors—similar...

Invaders!

There are three classes used to represent our invaders: Alien, AlienColumn, and AlienGroup.

Out of these classes, only Alien inherits from Actor because it is the only entity that is drawn and collides with other objects. Instead of a static image, the sprite will be a basic animation wherein each image will be shown for 0.5 seconds. This is achieved by loading an ImageGrid and creating an Animation from this sprite grid. Since these classes belong to the pyglet.image module, we need to import them first.

Another function of our aliens will be notifying its column that the object has been removed. Thanks to this, the column of aliens knows what the bottom one is and starts shooting from its position.

You learned from the CocosNode reference that the on_exit method is called when a node is removed, so you will be overriding it to inform its corresponding column. Note that a reference to the column is passed to the __init__ method. We could have implemented the same functionality...

Installing cocos2d


In our previous game, we did not use any third-party package since Tkinter was part of the Python standard library. This is not the case with our new game framework, which must be downloaded and installed.

The Python Package Index (also called PyPI) is an official software repository of third-party packages, and thanks to package manager systems, this process becomes very straightforward. The pip is the packaging tool recommendation, and it is already included in the latest Python installations.

You can check whether pip is installed by running pip --version. The output indicates the version of pip and where it is located. This information may vary depending on your Python version and its installation directory:

$ pip --version
pip 6.0.8 from C:\Python34\lib\site-packages (python 3.4)

Since cocos2d is available on the PyPI, you can install it by running the following command:

$ pip install cocos2d

This command downloads and installs not only the cocos2d package but also...

Getting started with cocos2d


As with any other framework, cocos2d is composed of several modules and classes that implement different features. In order to develop applications with this API, we need to understand the following basic concepts:

  • Scene: Each of the stages of your application is a scene. While your game may have many scenes, only one is active at any given point in time. The transition between scenes defines your game's workflow.

  • Layer: Every sheet contained in a scene, whose overlay creates the final appearance of the scene, is called a layer. For instance, your game's main scene may have a background layer, an HUD layer with player information and scores, and an animation layer, where events and collisions between sprites are being processed.

  • Sprite: This is a 2D image that can be manipulated though cocos2d actions, such as move, scale, or rotate. In our games, sprites will represent the player's character, enemies, and visual information, such as the number of lives left...

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Description

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.

Who is this book for?

If you have ever wanted to create casual games in Python and you would like to explore various GUI technologies that this language offers, this is the book for you. This title is intended for beginners to 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.

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Length: 230 pages
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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
1. Hello, Pong! Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Cocos Invaders Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Building a Tower Defense Game Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Steering Behaviors Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Pygame and 3D Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. PyPlatformer Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Augmenting a Board Game with Computer Vision Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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1 star 10%
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ruben Dec 02, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This is a very useful book it covers all the necesary to start by examples how to develop games with pythonVery Concise book, I have read many books but this one is the best, we need to have basics of programming and this title hasthe topics useful for that.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.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Winston Nov 30, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book takes the reader through using the powerful Python programming language to make entertaining 2D & 3D games. What was appealing to me was making the Tower Defense game in cocos2D. If you have prior Python programming experience and want to use Python code libraries to make 2D and 3D games this book is for u.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Tim Crothers Nov 30, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book delivers quite well on it's title. It starts with very simple examples and works up to more complex ones. In particular the final chapter on using a camera to monitor and convert a real life checkers game to digital was quite interesting and included an example not readily available elsewhere. You will need a solid working knowledge of Python 3 and object oriented programming in Python to get the most of this book but the book does an excellent job of getting you the core concepts of game programming.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
SuJo Dec 02, 2015
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This book was a great read, the principles for 2d game creation were easy to digest and really opened the door to the 3d realm gently. I find a few books I've ordered on Python Game Programming lack the details that open up the door to more advanced topics, this book is well designed and the Author knows the subject matter very well. I enjoyed both mock up games that you create in the book, the Tower Defense Game is really great and easily customized once you understand how to get things up and running.The things that stand out the most for me, the book is current, it isn't using old ancient frameworks, the code works, and the writing style kept me reading. Not dull or boring. Highly Recommend this title!
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El Tigre Oct 20, 2017
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This book is very good for the person that wants to take the next step in programming. Good variety of frameworks and step by step instruction with explanation of the code. I hope the update this soon.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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