How do you create buttons using pygame?

Question

I am creating a menu in python and in a pygame menu I would like to display 3 different options which are buttons. The buttons are:

• Play game
• Enter player names
• Exit

Could someone please help me and tell me how you create buttons using pygame

Answer 1

pygame (and the underlying library, SDL) is a library for building graphical applications in a cross-platform way. That means that it helps you create a Window, draw primative shapes/colors/textures to the screen, use sound, timers, etc. While it provides the ability to use its own APIs for drawing, you can also use it to hook into an OpenGL context to use a slightly different API for drawing 2D and 3D scenes.

However, pygame is not meant to do EVERYTHING related to creating graphical applications. Unlike technologies like Windows Forms or GTK+, pygame is designed to help create applications that need more support than just buttons/text fields/etc. It does not have too much support for making simple GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces). It is up to you to implement (or use a library) to implement that logic.

At this point, you can do a few things:

Create your own button using the drawing primatives.

This basically means that when you want to make a "button", you need to "draw" a button (the same way that you would "draw" anything in pygame). In addition, you would need to handle the input for when the button is "clicked", and everything else that goes into a proper interface that you would need.

This is A LOT of work to do correct, but can be done pretty simply. Basically, you need to keep track of the "boundaries" of the button, and then listen for the mouse click event. If the mouse is within the "boundaries" of the button when clicked, then you activate the logic that should happen when the button is clicked.

Things can become more complex when you need to deal with GUIs that move, hide, etc.

Use an existing library for user interfaces

In this case, you end up using an existing pygame-compatible GUI library. Google for "pygame gui library" and start playing around with them. These libraries have already implemented the logic I've discussed in the section above: drawing sprites to a screen, handling what happens when the button is clicked, etc.

Each GUI library will probably work differently: some might be easy to use, others might have better support for styling the buttons to look/feel differently. You will need to do some research to see what's right for you.

Use a non-pygame GUI library

In this case, you use a library like GTK+ or TKinter to build your interface. These libraries have built-in abilities to easily build "forms" with things like buttons, text fields, etc. However, they typically also have the ability to embed a pygame screen as a "widget".

It doesn't sound like this is really what you want to do, but I've added it as an option because others might come to this question and this would be their answer.

Conclusion

For more info on creating a GUI in pygame, you can read the GUI section on the pygame wiki. If you are looking for specific help with coding any of these above solutions, I would recommend trying on your own, and then when you get stuck post the code that is giving you issues.