Learning Python with Raspberry Pi

Chapter 5

Creating Games

IN THE LAST chapter you built graphical software using a GUI toolkit. This made it really easy to add buttons, text boxes, and all sorts of widgets to our software, but there's another sort of graphical application that doesn't use any of these things: games. We still need to draw things on the screen, but instead of check boxes and menus, we want fireballs, heroes, pits of doom, and all manner of fantastical graphics. Clearly, PySide isn't up to the task, but there is another module that will do exactly what we want, PyGame.

Raspbian comes with PyGame installed, but only for Python 2. Since we're building with Python 3, we'll need to install it. In this case, you'll have to compile the module from scratch, but this is a good chance to learn the process. First you need to install all the packages that PyGame will need, so open LXTerminal, and use apt-get (the package manager) to install the dependencies like so:

sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install libsdl-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev \   libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsmpeg-dev \   libportmidi-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev \   mercurial python3-dev

You'll notice that a lot of this code ends in -dev. These are the development files. You need them when compiling software that uses those libraries.

The next step is to get a copy of the latest version of PyGame. Since we're using Python 3, we need to get the very latest version, so we'll grab it straight from the development platform with the ...