Sloan Kelly - Python, PyGame, and Raspberry Pi Game Development

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-4532-3 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

This book is intended for anyone who wants to learn how to program games. It is ideally suited to students who want to learn Python and PyGame on their Raspberry Pi. While not necessary, this book has been oriented toward the Raspberry Pi computer.

The Python programming language is ideally suited to beginners and experts alike. The skills you will learn in this book are easily transferable to other computer languages too.

If you are unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi, there are several good eBook guides on getting started including mine called A Slice of Raspberry Pi , available from all good eBook retailers.

This book assumes that you are familiar with the Raspberry Pi computer and that you have the Raspberry Pi Foundations recommended Raspbian operating system installed. Raspbian is a distribution of the Debian Linux operating system built specifically for the Raspberry Pi. This distribution contains all the Software Development Kits (SDKs) including one for Python that includes PyGame. If you dont have Raspbian installed, you will have to ensure that you have Python and PyGame installed on your system.

Dont have a Raspberry Pi? Not to worry, you can still learn Python and PyGame. The code in this book will work on other OSs with Python and PyGame installed; Python is a platform-independent language.

You can obtain more information and download versions of Python from www.python.org . PyGame can be obtained from www.pygame.org/ .

Sprites from Ari Feldmans SpriteLib have been used for the projects contained in this book.

Throughout the book are lines of code that you can type in to tell the computer to perform actions, or to add text to a file. In the book, these lines will appear like this:

Python uses white space characters, notably tabs, to denote blocks of code. Because this is an eBook and it is not possible to know how tabs will be rendered on your device, white space is very important to Python, so remember to use the tab key to indent the lines exactly as written like so:

The line that starts with print has been indented using the tab key.

OS commands that are to be typed into a command window like Terminal will be preceded with a $ sign:

About the Author and About the Technical Reviewer

About the Author

Sloan Kelly

has worked in the games industry for nearly 12 years. He has worked on a number of AAA and indie titles and currently works for an educational game company. He lives in Ontario, Canada, with his wife and children. Sloan is on Twitter @codehoose and makes YouTube videos in his spare time.

About the Technical Reviewer

John Watson

is a game developer, artist, guitar player, husband, and father. Among Johns many software-powered side projects, hes building a Raspberry Pipowered device that generates interactive music in live modern dance performances. Hes also developing a retro-inspired 2D twin-stick arcade shooter called Gravity Ace. You can follow his progress on Twitter @yafd or at gravityace.com. Stop by and say hi!