Game Programming at scriptedfun » screencasts

Video Tutorial 4 – Arinoid – Ball Physics

Chuck — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:07:20 +0000

At last, video tutorial 4 is here! I would like to apologize for the terrible delay, and thank you so much for your patience!

You may notice some mistakes in the screenshots though – in particular when the code that converts between integers and floating point numbers is displayed. The highlighted code is correct, but the way that it appears in the following slides (without the float and int conversions) is incorrect.

The transcript for this will be available shortly, and the fifth video tutorial is in the works. Thank you so much, especially to all those who have left comments of encouragement! They really keep me going . I hope you find these helpful!

Source Code for Video Tutorial 4

Video Tutorial 3 – Arinoid – The Paddle

Chuck — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:05:27 +0000

Finally! Today, we will be adding the first sprite in our game, the paddle, which is controlled using the mouse. At this point, we will be able to benefit from the setting-up that we have done in the first two screencasts.

screencast 3 source

Video Tutorial 2 – Using Sprite Sheets and Drawing the Background

Chuck — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:03:35 +0000

To run the code for this screencast, you will need to have a data subdirectory containing the Arinoid sprite sheet file. You can easily fulfill this requirement by downloading the arinoid source from the post on Arinoid. Also, this will be needed for most, if not all, of the upcoming screencasts.

If you want to follow along the screencast, you will need an image editor that will allow you to select subregions of images and get the size and location of the selected subregion. To do this, I use The GIMP, a free and full-featured image editor. Of course, you can use any image editor that you’re comfortable with. In fact, I would love to know about your image editor suggestions !

By the way, once you view the screencast, you may notice that I select regions using The GIMP’s Crop and Resize Tool. Although it does the job, I still think that there’s a tool that’s more appropriate for the job. Can you help me out on this ?

I know I haven’t posted the transcript for the first screencast yet , but I plan to do so soon, and the same goes for this screencast .

screencast 2 source

Video Tutorial 1 – Making a Barebones Pygame Program

Chuck — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:01:54 +0000

I think that it could be easier to learn game programming through a video tutorial – you’re actually able to see the code unfold before your eyes, with audio explanations – rather than through reading – although I think that reading is great and won’t be replaced anytime soon. Probably 90% of what I know about programming I learned through reading.

With this in mind, I’ve prepared a video tutorial explaining how to make a basic Pygame application from scratch. It’s only 2.3 MB, and according to Martindale’s Download Time Calculator, should only take 5 minutes and 29 seconds to completely download over a 56K modem connection. The video itself is about 7 minutes and 13 seconds long. The video was made using the freeware app DebugMode Wink.

This code and probably all the code that I’m ever going to write in Pygame is based heavily on the Aliens example included in the Pygame source distribution and Line By Line Chimp Example. I encourage you to grab a copy of the source distribution – you can learn a lot just by reading the code.

I will post a transcript of the video soon for those who cannot view the video or for those who prefer to read.

Screencast #1 Source Code