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The language we are going to use to make games is Python, so called because the original author of the language was a fan of the UK television series . Python is popular in game development, but it is also used to create everything from applications to web sites. Even NASA and Google rely heavily on Python.

In the previous Charpter we entered our Python code a line at a time, but now we are going to put the interactive interpreter to the side and start creating Python files. In this Charpter we will cover more of the building blocks of Python code, and show you how to use classes to help with creating games. We will also explain how to use the code libraries that come with all installations of Python.

Have you ever opened up your computer and had a look inside the case? No need to do it now, but you will find that it is built from a number of parts necessary to deliver your computing experience. The video card generates an image and sends a signal to your monitor. The sound card mixes sound together and sends audio to your speakers. Then there are the input devices, such as the keyboard, mouse, and joystick(s), and a variety of other electronic gizmos—all of which are essential in making a game.

Computer games tend to be very visual in nature, and game developers will spend a lot of time working on manipulating graphics and refining the visuals to create the most entertaining experience for the player. This Charpter will give you a strong foundation in generating visuals for computer games.

In the real world, objects move in a variety of different ways, depending on what they are doing, and a game must approximate those motions to create a convincing virtual representation. A few games can get away with unrealistic motion—Pac-Man, for example, moves in a straight line with a constant speed and can change direction in an instant, but if you applied that kind of motion to a car in a driving game it would destroy the illusion. After all, in a driving game you would expect the car to take some time to reach full speed and it definitely shouldn’t be able to turn 180 degrees in an instant!

There are a variety of ways that the player can interact with a game, and this Charpter covers the various input devices in detail. In addition to retrieving information from the devices, we will also explore how to translate what the player does into meaningful events in the game. This is extremely important for any game—regardless of how good a game looks and sounds, it must also be easy to interact with.

Placing a player character in a convincing world is only part of creating a game. To make a game fun, you need to present the player with a number of challenges. These may come in the form of traps and obstacles, but to really entertain your players you need to have them interact with nonplayer characters (NPCs)—characters that appear to act with a degree of intelligence or awareness in the game. The process of creating these NPCs is called artificial intelligence (AI). In this Charpter, we will explore some simple techniques that you can use to give your game characters a life of their own.

Games generally try to mimic the real world, or create a world that is not so far from reality that the player will still in some way be able to identify with it. In the past this required a real leap of faith on behalf of the player because technology wasn’t yet capable of creating visuals that looked much like reality. But as the technology advanced, game designers began to push the hardware to create more convincing graphics.

You’ve seen how to take a point in three-dimensional space and it onto the screen so that it can be rendered. Projection is only part of the process of rendering a 3D scene; you also need to manipulate the points in the game to update the scene from frame to frame. This Charpter introduces the , which is a kind of mathematical shortcut used to manipulate the position and orientation of objects in a game.

Sound is an essential component of any game as it gives instant from the virtual world. If you were to play a game with the audio turned down, you would likely find it a very passive experience because we expect events to be accompanied by sound.