Teach Your Kids To Code: A Parent-friendly Guide to Python Programming

Game Programming: Coding for Fun 261

After mastering the concepts in this chapter, you should be
able to do the following:

• Recognize common game design elements in games and apps
that you use.

• Incorporate game design elements into apps that you code.

• Build a skeleton of a game by drawing the board and playing
pieces and adding user interaction.

• Program collision detection between game pieces and keep
score in an app or game.

• Display text information on the screen using the pygame.font
module.

• Write game logic to determine when a game is over.

• Detect and handle keypress events in Pygame.

• Develop the code to start a new game or play again after a
game ends.

• Use math and logic to make games progressively more difficult

• Add sounds to your apps with the pygame.mixer module.

• Display percentages and rounded numbers to keep users
informed of their progress in a game.

• Understand the process of iterative versioning: adding features
to an app one at a time and saving it as a new version (1.0, 2.0,
and so on).

Programming Challenges

For sample answers to these challenges, and to download

the sound files for this chapter, go to http://www.nostarch

.com/teachkids/.

#1: Sound Effects

One feature we could add to Smiley Pong, version 2.0, is

sound effects. In the classic Pong console and arcade game,

the ball made a “blip” noise when players scored a point and

a “buzz” or “blap” noise when they missed. For one of your

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