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🧲 Building a Mini Physics Engine in Python with Pygame

Photo by Chris Nagahama on Unsplash

When most people think of Python, they imagine automation scripts, data analysis, or web scraping. But Python is also powerful and fun for visual simulations — especially when paired with libraries like Pygame.

In this post, let’s build a basic physics engine from scratch using Pygame, simulating gravity, motion, collisions, and friction.

We’ll:

• Represent objects with position, velocity, acceleration.
• Simulate gravity.
• Handle collisions with screen edges.
• Add basic friction.

🧱 Getting Started: The Setup

You’ll need Pygame installed:

pip install pygame

🌀 Full Simulation Code

import pygame
import random
import math

# Constants
WIDTH, HEIGHT = 800, 600
FPS = 60
GRAVITY = 0.5
FRICTION = 0.99
BOUNCE = 0.8

# Initialize Pygame
pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((WIDTH, HEIGHT))
clock = pygame.time.Clock()

# Colors
WHITE = (255, 255, 255)
BLUE = (50, 50, 255)

# Physics object class
class Ball:
    def __init__(self, x, y, radius=20):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y
        self.radius = radius
        self.vx = random.uniform(-5, 5)
        self.vy…