October 4, 2007 will

Free chapter of Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame

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.

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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

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Eduardo de Oliveira Padoan

Awesome, thanks you!

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Mark Melvin

Congratulations! I've had the book on order for some time and I can't wait until it arrives! Of course, I am still plodding through my two OpenGL books... There simply aren't enough hours in the day.

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David Montgomery

Congratulations, Will!

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Rene Dudfield

Congratulations!

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Bert Heymans

Cool! I really hope the rest of the book lives up to the expectation this chapter creates. It's already on my whishlist. Good stuff ... :)

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[...] free chapter of beginning game dev with python [...]

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gab

Would there be any online version available?

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Will

Actually yes, Apress will be offering an e-book version.

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Calvin Spealman

Even if I know much of the material already, I am looking forward to reading over this and handing it off to others. Congratulations!

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Pete

Just pre-ordered the book. I can't wait.

I am actually looking at doing a simple top-down 2D tile game in the Ultima flavour and hope I can glean some things out of this book to help out.

Any sections I should pay particular attention to?

Cheers,
Pete

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Jon

Got mime today via Amazon :)

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Will

Hope you enjoy it Jon! Maybe you could post a review on Amazon?

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Mark Melvin

Lucky you! Mine is delayed again until November! :o(

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Jon

I will indeed, looks good so far!

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Mark Melvin

Sweet! My book arrived today! Time to get started...

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eddyfosman

thank you so much ^.^