Pong Tutorial using Pygame – Getting Started

This tutorial is the first tutorial in a series of five Pygame tutorials:

• Pong Tutorial 1: Getting Started
• Pong Tutorial 2: Adding the Paddles
• Pong Tutorial 3: Controlling the Paddles
• Pong Tutorial 4: Adding a Bouncing Ball
• Pong Tutorial 5: Adding a Scoring system
• Extra: Pygame How To’s?

Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games, first released in 1972 by Atari. It is a two-player game based on table tennis. The game features simple 2D graphics. It consists of two paddles used to return a bouncing ball back and forth across the screen. The score is kept by the numbers at the top of the screen.

In this tutorial we are going to recreate a game of Pong using Python and the Pygame library. The Pygame library is the perfect library to build basic 2D arcade games and to start developing your OOP skills. (Object-Oriented Programming)

Step 1: Importing and initialising the Pygame library

Your Python code will need to start with the following two lines of code:

# Import the pygame library and initialise the game engine
import pygame
pygame.init()

Step 2: Defining the colours you will use in your game

You will have to declare a constant for each of the main colours used within your game. To help you identify colour codes you may use a colour picker. Pong is a very basic game and only uses two colours: black and white.

# Define some colors
BLACK = (0,0,0)
WHITE = (255,255,255)

Step 3: Open a new window

Your game will run in its own window, for which you can decide of a title, a width and a height.

# Open a new window
size = (700, 500)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)
pygame.display.set_caption("Pong")

Step 4: The main program loop

The main program loop is the key wrapper for your game.

The main program loop will contain 3 main sections:

• Capturing Events: Used to constantly “listen” to user inputs and react to these. It could be when the user uses the keyboard or the mouse.
• Implementing the Game Logic. What happens when the game is running? Are cars moving forward, aliens falling from the sky, ghosts chasing you, etc.
• Refreshing the screen by redrawing the stage and the sprites.

The main program loop will also use a frame rate to decide how often should the program complete the loop (& refresh the screen) per second. To implement this we will use the clock object from the pygame library.

The main program loop will use a timer to decide how many times it will be executed per second.

# Import the pygame library and initialise the game engine
import pygame
pygame.init()

# Define some colors
BLACK = (0,0,0)
WHITE = (255,255,255)

# Open a new window
size = (700, 500)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)
pygame.display.set_caption("Pong")

# The loop will carry on until the user exits the game (e.g. clicks the close button).
carryOn = True
 
# The clock will be used to control how fast the screen updates
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
 
# -------- Main Program Loop -----------
while carryOn:
    # --- Main event loop
    for event in pygame.event.get(): # User did something
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT: # If user clicked close
              carryOn = False # Flag that we are done so we exit this loop
 
    # --- Game logic should go here
 

 
    # --- Drawing code should go here
    # First, clear the screen to black. 
    screen.fill(BLACK)
    #Draw the net
    pygame.draw.line(screen, WHITE, [349, 0], [349, 500], 5)
 
    # --- Go ahead and update the screen with what we've drawn.
    pygame.display.flip()
     
    # --- Limit to 60 frames per second
    clock.tick(60)
 
#Once we have exited the main program loop we can stop the game engine:
pygame.quit()

Next Step?

Your background is ready? Let’s add the first sprite to your project by completing the next tutorial:
Pong Tutorial using Pygame:Adding the Paddles