Pygame – 1. The Plan

Game development can seem extremely complicated, and once you get into it there are certainly some very heavy topics, but getting started doesn’t have to be excruciating if you have the right resources to learn from. Searching through examples online or reading books is how most people begin, but it can be hard to get a truly comprehensive guide for those first few important steps. The goal of these tutorials is to give you a solid place to start as you get your feet wet by progressing you through the creation of a few simple well known games, slowly increasing the complexity and introducing more topics as we go. Each tutorial will start from scratch and finish with a complete, working game. Along with the code, we will go over the thought process so you can understand why we are doing each step. At the end of the tutorial set you won’t be able to jump straight into the game industry, but hopefully you will have the proper base knowledge and confidence you need to create your own games and both find and learn new knowledge on your own.

The tutorials are aimed at game development beginners and as such cover very basic (but critical) topics. Each one will provide the working source code at the end, but to get the most out of it you should be creating your own code as you follow along. All the tutorials take the same general form — 1. set up the basics  2. add features until you have a working game  3. polish. For example, in the Pong tutorials you will put the paddles and the ball on the board first. Next you’ll make the ball move and bounce off the paddles – the essence of Pong. Most tutorials quit here, but at this point you’re only 80% finished. In step 3 you will add the extra fluff that makes a game complete – maybe a splash screen, a start menu, or a high score table. Hopefully all this together gives you a full understanding of what it takes to make a game and you’ll be a better game developer after because of it.

The most important thing to remember is that these tutorials showcase just a few of many ways to solve the same problems. As with all programming, the beauty is in the fact that every working solution is valid as long as it ‘runs fast enough’. Learn from these examples, but don’t let them corral your imagination or problem solving because those are the true skills you need to make games successfully.