Welcome to Animal Simulation Tutorial for Pygame Zero!

In this tutorial we’ll use Python to explore modelling an group of animals, with sheep, a sheep dog, wolves and you as a shepherd trying to take care of everything.

We’ll learn about classes, forces between animals (attraction and fear) and a bit of geometry maths too (don’t worry, we’ll guide you through it).

If you’ve not yet set up Pygame Zero and the editor Mu, head over to our Flappy Bird Tutorial and follow the instructions there.

If you’re new to Python programming then that Flappy Bird tutorial is probably better place to start – this tutorial is significantly harder.

Installing Assets

Download the tutorial assets by clicking this link. You can close that page once the download finishes. Click on the Images button in the Mu editor. This will open the directory where Pygame Zero looks for images. Copy the images from the images.zip file you just downloaded into this directory.

Start the Tutorial

Click on the Part 1 link below to get started.

Contents:

• Part 1
  • Getting Started
  • Creating an animal
  • Let’s add some movement
  • More animals
  • Moving in different directions
  • Sheep flock together
• Part 2
  • Step 1: Distance with Pythagoras
  • Step 2: Compute a force of attraction
  • Step 3: Find the angle between two sheep
  • Step 4: Use the angle to move the sheep
  • Final step: bring it all together
  • Bugs
  • Not too close
  • Divide by Zero?
  • Leaving the screen
• Part 3
  • New kinds of Animal
  • An obedient sheep dog
  • Run away from the sheep dog
  • Coming up soon

Get in touch

We would love to hear how you’ve got on with this tutorial or receive any other feedback. Get in touch with the author: Eric Clack <eric@bn7.net>

Credits

Images:

• Sheep: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-style-farm-animals

• Sheep Dog: https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/137239-border-collie-vector-illustrarion-sets

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page