Paris Graphics

I recently Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)reviewed the book “Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)” by Will McGugan at Amazon. If you read my review you’ll see it was somewhat a mixed reaction. I was really hoping to find the perfect book for teaching game programming and while this one is good and covers some interesting topics, I think it may not be as hands on as most students would like. As some of the other reviewers mentioned, they would have liked to see a full working game.

That being said, I was cleaning up my desktop in preparation for going to CA next week and found some code that I was playing with while reading this book. This code comes from Chapter 4 of the book where the author is discussing the pygame.draw functions. Since I’m always playing around with math based visuals, I decided to tweak the examples a bit. These aren’t rocket science or even useful for a game, but give an idea of how you could do visuals with pygame.draw

circleTest.py draws circles across the screen in different directions.

drawingLinesMOD.py draws perspective lines across the screen bobbing to a sine wave.

polytestRAND.py draws random polygons on the screen - kind of screen saver-ish

So while none of this is ground breaking, I think it shows how you could use Pygame for doing visuals. In fact, about a year ago I was doing that. Dots, Plasmas, Blurs, Rotozooms, etc. but decided to go with C/C++ instead because it was considerably faster on the GP2X which was my target platform. Still, if I can find any of those Pygame demos I’ll post them. Or you can search and find some other ones on the web.