How to draw rectangle in Pygame? (original) (raw)

Last Updated : 13 Jun, 2025

**Pygame is a popular Python library for game development and multimedia, built on top of the SDL library. One of the most basic graphical operations in Pygame is drawing shapes, such as rectangles. **Rectangles are essential for making buttons, frames, game objects and more. It's key functions for drawing rectangles.

The basic syntax for drawing a rectangle is:

pygame.draw.rect(surface, color, rect, width=0)

**Parameters:

• **surface: The surface or screen where the rectangle will be drawn.
• **color: The color of the rectangle in RGB format. For example, (255, 0, 0) is red.
• **rect: A pygame.Rect object or a tuple specifying (x, y, width, height).
• **width (optional): Thickness of the border. If width=0 (default), the rectangle is filled with color. If a positive number, only the border is drawn.

Examples

**Example 1: Here, we draw a filled pink square at position (30, 30) with width and height of 60 pixels.

Python `

import pygame pygame.init()
surface = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300)) # window color = (255, 192, 203)

pygame.draw.rect(surface, color, pygame.Rect(30, 30, 60, 60))
pygame.display.flip() pygame.time.wait(3000) # Pause for 3 seconds pygame.quit()

`

**Output

Filled pink square

**Explanation:

• **pygame.draw.rect(surface, color, pygame.Rect(30, 30, 60, 60)) draws a filled rectangle at position (30, 30) with width 60 and height 60.
• **pygame.display.flip() updates the screen to display the drawn rectangle.
• **pygame.time.wait(3000) keeps the window open for 3 seconds.

**Example 2: Here, we draw a red rectangle with only a 2-pixel thick border and no fill inside.

Python `

import pygame pygame.init() surface = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300)) # window color = (255, 0, 0)

Draw rectangle border (width=2)

pygame.draw.rect(surface, color, pygame.Rect(30, 30, 60, 60), 2)

pygame.display.flip() pygame.time.wait(3000) pygame.quit()

`

**Output

Red rectangle border

**Explanation:

• **pygame.draw.rect(....) draws a rectangle border (not filled) at position (30, 30) with width 60 and height 60. The 2 specifies the border thickness in pixels.
• Updates the screen to show the rectangle, waits for 3 seconds and then closes the Pygame window.

**Example 3: Here, we draw three rectangles: one filled red, one with a green 5-pixel border, and one with a blue 10-pixel border.

Python `

import pygame pygame.init() surface = pygame.display.set_mode((500, 400))

colors

red = (255, 0, 0) green = (0, 255, 0) blue = (0, 0, 255)

pygame.draw.rect(surface, red, pygame.Rect(50, 50, 100, 80)) pygame.draw.rect(surface, green, pygame.Rect(200, 50, 100, 80), 5) pygame.draw.rect(surface, blue, pygame.Rect(350, 50, 100, 80), 10)

pygame.display.flip() pygame.time.wait(4000) pygame.quit()

`

**Output

Multiple rectangles shown

**Explanation:

• **pygame.draw.rect(...) draws three rectangles at the top of the screen, a filled red rectangle, a green rectangle with 5px border and a blue rectangle with 10px border, each with position and size specified using **pygame.Rect().
• Displays all rectangles on the window, keeps the window open for 4 seconds and then closes it.

**Example 4: Here, we animate a blue rectangle moving from left to right across the screen in a loop.

Python `

import pygame pygame.init() w, h = 600, 200 # size s = pygame.display.set_mode((w, h)) c_white, c_blue = (255,255,255), (0,0,255) # colors x, y, rw, rh, spd = 0, 50, 60, 40, 5 # rect params clk = pygame.time.Clock() # clock

run = True
while run: for e in pygame.event.get(): if e.type == pygame.QUIT: run = False

s.fill(c_white) 
pygame.draw.rect(s, c_blue, (x, y, rw, rh))  
x = (x + spd) % (w + rw) - rw 
pygame.display.flip()  
clk.tick(30)  

pygame.quit()

`

**Output

Animated moving rectangle

**Explanation:

• **while loop keeps the program active until the window is closed, handling events and updating the screen by clearing it and drawing the moving blue rectangle that wraps around horizontally.
• **pygame.display.flip() refreshes the display each frame, while **clk.tick(30) limits the frame rate to 30 FPS for smooth animation.