Pygame Master 1

I think that the most hard stuff to start with Pygame is to… start, if you forgive the words game. In fact there are a lot non intuitive stuff to learn just to make a simple window without making it to crash, to load a sound in the right way, and image, not to talk about other stuff. Once you learned this, you can make very nice thing with pygame, so it’s a shame that you can be stopped by these silly stuff. For this reason, I am making this post where you can take care of all these basic stuffs at easy to have everything under control and without having to rewrite them everytime. So, here I will show you some stuff I learned and that I wished someone could have told me before.

It’s just a window with everything ready to go

The first thing we are going to do is to fix the window with the way to close it (with the x button and the escape key) and to initialize the code for the audio to be the best. I added also a class for the colors, it is not necessary, but I like to have everything organized in the right place with the right name, to get the full controll of all the code process. It is a personal choice, I know, you do not have to do it.

import pygame
import sys
from glob import glob
import os


class Colors:
    BLACK = (0, 0, 0)
    RED = (255, 0, 0)
    GREEN = (0, 255, 0)
    YELLOW = (255, 255, 0)
    ORANGE = (128, 255, 0)
    BLUE = (0, 0, 255)
    GRAY = (255, 255, 255)


def mixer():
    "Initializing pygame and mixer"
    pygame.mixer.pre_init(44100, -16, 1, 512)
    pygame.init()
    pygame.mixer.quit()
    pygame.mixer.init(22050, -16, 2, 512)
    pygame.mixer.set_num_channels(32)


def load_sounds(directory="sounds"):
    "store in sounds dic all the sound in the directory by their name"
    global sounds
    if "sounds" not in os.listdir():
        os.mkdir("sounds")

    lsounds = glob(f"{directory}\\*.wav")
    # Dictionary with all sounds, keys are the name of wav
    sounds = {}
    for sound in lsounds:
        sounds[sound.split("\\")[1][:-4]] = pygame.mixer.Sound(f"{sound}")

def play(sound):
    "It plays the sounds by the name of the file without .wav"
    global sounds
    try:
        pygame.mixer.Sound.play(sounds[sound])
    except KeyError:
        print(f"------\nAlert!\nfile '{sound}.wav' not found in 'sounds'\n------")
        print("Check the name of the file in the sounds folder")


def create_fonts(family="Arial", size=24):
    return pygame.font.SysFont(family, size)


def init(size=(400, 400), name="Game"):
    "The screen and the clock"
    global screen, clock
    screen = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 400))
    pygame.display.set_caption("Game")
    clock = pygame.time.Clock()
    mixer()
    load_sounds()


def event_listener():
    "Intercept the user inputs"
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        k = pygame.KEYDOWN
        e = pygame.K_ESCAPE
        escape = event.type == k and event.key == e
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT or escape:
            pygame.quit()
            sys.exit()


def main():
    "Takes care of the process inside the main window"
    while 1:
        # Intercept user inputs
        event_listener()
        pygame.display.update()
        clock.tick(360)


# ====================== Start ======
''' This initialize pygame, the mixer, load the sounds
'''
init(size=(400, 400), name="Game")
play("over2")
# this opens the window
main()

So the while loop takes care of what is goin’ on on the window. I’ve put outside the input control (event_listener()) to mantain the while loop clean and easy to manage, because it’s there that all the things starts to happen.