Getting Started

This section shows you how to create your first example game using python.

In-Page Navigation
  1. Setup
  2. Start the game with an empty scene
  3. Optional: Run each step of this tutorial in your own computer

Setup

1. Have Python installed. You only need to do it once in your computer.

2. Open a new folder that will contain everything about the game

Name the new folder, let say, my_first_game

3. Download the Pyscratch github repo into the new folder

Your folder should look like this:

├─ my_first_game/
    ├─ pyscratch/
        ├─ ...

4. Pip install the library

Open the folder my_first_game on vscode (or cd into my_first_game) and then run pip install -e pyscratch in the terminal.

5. You are good to go!

Start the game with an empty scene

Create a new file in the folder called main.py

This is how the folder should look like:

├─ my_first_game/
    ├─ pyscratch/
    ├─ main.py

main.py is where you start the game. Put in these lines below and run the script main.py.

import pyscratch as pysc

SCREEN_WIDTH = 1280
SCREEN_HEIGHT = 720
FRAMERATE = 60 

# set screen size
pysc.game.update_screen_mode((SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT)) 

# start the game with a the framerate
pysc.game.start(FRAMERATE)

You should see a pygame window open. The program finishes when you close the window.

Optional: Run each step of this tutorial in your own computer

1. Set the working directory

Open the terminal in vscode, set the folder my_first_game/pyscratch/example/getting-started as your working directory using the cd command. The cd command set a folder inside the current working directory to be the new working directory.

For example, assuming that you have the folder my_first_game opened in vscode, the default working directory of your terminal in vscode would be my_first_game. So just run cd pyscratch/example/getting-started in the terminal.

2. Open main.py of step you want to run, and click the run button near the top-left corner.

Video Guide

Table of contents