✨

Flap to Fly

The bird falls… and falls… and there is nothing we can do about it. Until now. Let’s give the player control. Press SPACE and the bird flaps upward.

Listening for Input

Pygame keeps a list of everything the player does: key presses, mouse clicks, closing the window. These are called events.

A spacebar key with a POW explosion icon above it, showing the concept of a key press event

Every key press creates an event that your code can react to.

👂

The event loop

Each frame, we loop through all events with pygame.event.get(). We check: is this event a key press? If yes, which key? That is how we know the player wants to flap.

The Flap Trick

Remember: positive velocity = falling down. So to go UP, we set velocity to a negative number.

⬇️

velocity = +5

Bird moves down (Y increases)

⬆️

velocity = -8

Bird shoots up (Y decreases)

💡

Why -8?

The exact number controls how strong the flap feels. Too small (-2) and the bird barely moves. Too big (-20) and it rockets off screen. -8 feels just right, a satisfying hop.

What is the best way to make the bird go up?

Reading the Code

Here is how we detect a spacebar press and make the bird jump.

flap logic

1for event in pygame.event.get():

🔄 Loop through everything the player did this frame

2 if event.type == pygame.QUIT:

3 pygame.quit()

4 sys.exit()

6 if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:

⌨️ Was a key pressed down?

7 if event.key == pygame.K_SPACE:

🔍 Was it specifically the SPACE bar?

8 bird_velocity = -8

🚀 Launch upward: negative velocity = up

Your Turn: Add the Flap

Fill in the blanks to make the bird jump when SPACE is pressed.

🎯

Level Goal

Detect the SPACE key press and set velocity to -8 to make the bird jump.

Logic Lab: python.py

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for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == pygame.: if event.key == pygame.: bird_velocity =

Choose for blank #1