Next, we prepare a font attribute for rendering text 3.
The None argu-
ment tells Pygame to use the default font, and 48 specifies the size of the
text. To center the button on the screen, we create a rect for the button 4
and set its center attribute to match that of the screen.
Pygame works with text by rendering the string you want to display as
an image. Finally, we call _prep_msg() to handle this rendering 5.
Here’s the code for _prep_msg():
button.py def _prep_msg(self, msg):
"""Turn msg into a rendered image and center text on the button."""
1 self.msg_image = self.font.render(msg, True, self.text_color,
self.button_color)
2 self.msg_image_rect = self.msg_image.get_rect()
self.msg_image_rect.center = self.rect.center
The _prep_msg() method needs a self parameter and the text to be ren-
dered as an image (msg). The call to font.render() turns the text stored in
msg into an image, which we then store in self.msg_image 1. The font.render()
method also takes a Boolean value to turn antialiasing on or off (antialiasing
makes the edges of the text smoother). The remaining arguments are the
specified font color and background color. We set antialiasing to True and set
the text background to the same color as the button. (If you don’t include
a background color, Pygame will try to render the font with a transparent
background.)
We center the text image on the button by creating a rect from the
image and setting its center attribute to match that of the button 2.
Finally, we create a draw_button() method that we can call to display the
button onscreen:
button.py def draw_button(self):
"""Draw blank button and then draw message."""
self.screen.fill(self.button_color, self.rect)
self.screen.blit(self.msg_image, self.msg_image_rect)
We call screen.fill() to draw the rectangular portion of the button. Then
we call screen.blit() to draw the text image to the screen, passing it an image
and the rect object associated with the image. This completes the Button class.
Drawing the Button to the Screen
We’ll use the Button class to create a Play button in AlienInvasion. First, we’ll
update the import statements:
alien_invasion.py --snip--
from game_stats import GameStats
from button import Button
Scoring 279
