Introduction to Pygame and its Structure for Visual Novels

What is Pygame?

Pygame is a Python library designed for the development of video games and other interactive applications that use 2D graphics, sound and user input control. Although it is primarily used for video games, it is also excellent for creating visual novels, due to its flexibility in handling images, sounds and events.

Basic structure of a Pygame program

The structure of a Pygame program follows a standard flow:

• Initialization: Pygame modules are initialized.

• Bucle principal: El juego o aplicación corre en un bucle que maneja eventos, actualiza los estados de los elementos en pantalla y los dibuja.

• Cierre: Se manejan los eventos de salida y se limpian los recursos utilizados.

Basic example of a program structure in Pygame

import pygame
import sys

# Initialization
pygame.init()

# Basic configurations
pantalla = pygame.display.set_mode((800, 600))
pygame.display.set_caption("Visual Novel in Pygame")
reloj = pygame.time.Clock()

# Main loop
corriendo = True
while corriendo:
    # Event management
    for evento in pygame.event.get():
        if evento.type == pygame.QUIT:
            corriendo = False

    # Screen update
    pantalla.fill((255, 255, 255))  ## White background
    pygame.display.flip()

    # FPS control
    reloj.tick(60)

# Close
pygame.quit()
sys.exit()

Explanation of the code

• Initialization: pygame.init() initializes the Pygame modules. Display: pygame.display.set_mode() creates a window where the elements of the visual novel will be drawn.

• Main loop: Inside the loop, events (such as closing the window) are handled, the state of the elements on the screen is updated, and the screen is refreshed with pygame.display.flip().

• Clock: pygame.time.Clock() manages the refresh rate to maintain a constant flow (60 FPS in this case).

• Close: When the user closes the window, the loop ends and Pygame closes with pygame.quit().