My book, Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame, is finally finished! It was a labor of love, and a lot of work. Apress have graciously allowed me to give away a free chapter.

I chose chapter 7, which is on the subject of Artificial Intelligence. I selected this chapter because it is nicely self-contained and doesn't require much additional understanding of other game concepts. It is an unusual chapter, in that it contains the largest listing in the book. I tried to avoid really long listings, but in this case I think it was justified so that the code in the book actually runs; I hate leaving any code as an exercise for the reader.

Download Chapter 7, Take me to Your Leader

Chapter 7 discusses how to build a simple AI simulation of an ants nest using a state machine, a technique which can be applied to virtually any simulation that you might want in a game. You can download the code for the book below, it isn't interactive, but I think it is entertaining to watch for a minute or two! Download Ant Simulation

The ant simulation uses the gameobjects library, which you can install with the following comand:

easy_install gameobjects

The book will be available in all good book shops, and some bad ones, on October 24th. Thanks to everyone at Apress for guiding me through the writing process! Update: I blogged the Table of Contents