Pygame Camera Tutorial: How to Make a Side-Scrolling Camera System

In this tutorial, we'll be creating a camera side-scrolling camera system. We'll learn how scrolling works and how we can make our camera as flexible as possible.

All code/images can be found on my github:

Timestamps:
Intro to cameras in side-scrollers: 0:09
Creating the Camera Class : 0:58
Class Diagram: 2:08
Creating the Scroll Methods: 3:07
Following the Player (Follow): 3:41
Limiting the Camera View (Border): 5:14
Auto Scroll (Auto): 6:16
Putting it all together: 6:58
Showcasing the Camera System: 8:01

In the hopes of not wasting peoples time, I recorded this tutorial a little faster than normal, so feel free to watch it at 75% feed and pause as you need to :)

Music: Pokemon Gold/Silver - Pewter City

#pygame #gamedev #camera

[rolpon]

Great Tutorial! I haven't watched this fully, but I'm sure it's great. It Seems very easy to understand. Good Job~

[kayes]

Hi. I have an error saying: TypeError: object.__init__() takes exactly one argument (the instance to initialize)

[АртёмПетров-ччы]

thank you so much. For a very long time I couldn't find a way to implement camera . This video really helped me.

[alastairm]

Great video! I was wondering if you could elaborate on hot to get the follow cam to lag behind the player a bit to try to make a smooth camera movement?

[andreperras]

Christian your videos are fantastic, you deserve and need more exposure to grow your following.

[OneShotOneKill]

theres is a problem with my code it says AttributeError: 'pygame.Surface' object has no attribute 'rect'

[thunder]

Thank you so much for the tutorial, it is exactly what i needed for my project! <3

[shady]

Hi could you do a similiar video, but for moving in any direction and the camera follows you. I think its referred to as "box camera"

[kelinci]

I like how you explain it concisely and clearly.... very helpfull tutorial

[JkaBG]

Thank you very much. This is the only usefull camera tutorial that i have found on youtube

[i_teleported_bread]

How do I work out what the values should be for my "self.left_border", "self.right_border" and "self.ground_y" variables?

Also, in the Github files for this, it references a "self.box" variable, but it doesn't seem to do anything in the code. What is it used for?

[subarunatsuki]

Your Videos are always soo good! Please keep it up :D

[justcallmespike]

I can't find the part where you define "player.ground_y", "player.left_border" or "player.right_border".

[exetude]

can u make a video about syntax in pygame and all of pygames features and how to impliment them because all of the class stuff and camera functions are so confusing because of my lack of understanding about how such things work especially classes i only know the basics of classes and don't understand it very well

[bivashy]

Thank you, your code helped for my game! I think you are good in the right now

[dominiknowec]

isn't that troubling that rectangles are in completly diffrent places than their surfaces? This approach looks a little odd to me.

[embodythelogos]

Hi, can you add a MIT license to your Github repository? I want to use your code as a reference for a part of the project which I will use for commercial purpose. I guess making the tutorial means you want me to learn from your code and make modifications to it to fit my needs. However, I still want to make sure; I don't want to deal with any legal issues. Thank you!!

[brontosaurus]

how do i check collision with other objects please ? the cats rect is now far of the rendering position.

[electrotal]

great tutorial, but i have an error that says that i dont have an object that called ground_y..
can you help me with that?

[blankbtw]

can you explain the math in the const value?