Pygame Reloaded 2.0.0-alpha5 was released.

You can get more information at the pgreloaded page.

Julian Habrock has started on his new draw module for pygame/pygame2 as his GSOC project. You can follow his progress on his pygamedraw blog. Julian is being mentored by Marcus Von Appen.

"The aim is to have one draw module for pygame that implements not only the very basic drawing of a few plain color shapes but also drawing of more advanced shapes and whith more advanced attributes (ie. curves, rounded corners, aa, etc.) as well as alternative filling methods (ie. procedural or image based textures, filling from another surface/image (cloning), etc.)."

Unfortunately Marcus was the only person available to mentor pygame projects this year, so the pygamedraw project is the only pygame GSOC project happening this year.

As well SDL, the main media library pygame uses, has a number of projects for GSOC this year.

* Daniel Wyatt is working on the Windows IME implementation, working with Jiang (a GSoC student from last year) to update the API and build working Japanese input support.

* Eli Gottlieb is working on shaped window support for Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

* Jim Grandpre is working on adding support for multi-touch devices and developing a complete gesture recognition framework.

* Paul Hunkin is working on an official port of SDL 1.3 to the Android.

* Sunny Sachanandani is working on integrating X11 XRender support into SDL 1.3, with support for hardware accelerated blending and more.

Pygame Reloaded 2.0.0-alpha4 was released.

You can get more information at the pgreloaded wiki page.

Now the python package index 'pypi' has a trove classifier for pygame.

Here is the classifier for pygame related packages:
'Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: pygame'

So if you've written a game, or library that can be used with pygame, please stick that into your 'classifiers' meta data.

Python packages can specify trove classifiers to help categorise what packages are for. It is just one part of meta data used by the package index. By the way, games and applications can be put onto the package index as well if you want to share them with people. You just need to put them into a package first.

A new Hitch hikers guide to packaging is available. With the 'HHGTP' in your back pocket, you can navigate your way around the universe of python packaging without fear of getting lost.

The 10th Python Game Programming Challenge (PyWeek) is coming. It'll run from the 28th of March to the 4th of April.

The PyWeek challenge:

1. Invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team,
2. Is intended to be challenging and fun,
3. Will hopefully increase the public body of game tools, code and expertise,
4. Will let a lot of people actually finish a game, and
5. May inspire new projects (with ready made teams!)

Pygame Reloaded 2.0.0-alpha3 was released.

You can get more information at the pgreloaded wiki page.

http://www.ludumdare.com/

Theme suggestions are a go: http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/ld16:themes. The theme will be voted on leading up to the start of the competition. Just as the competition is to start the theme is announced, and you have 48 hours to make a game from scratch(including art, game design, music, sounds and coding). You also have to do it by yourself.

Even though you code the game by your self, there are usually over 100 other people doing the same thing that weekend. So you get a lot of quick feedback from other people about your game. The energy from everyone making things at the same time is intoxicating. People keep blogs, of their progress, or what food they are eating over the 48 hours. It is a lot of fun, rather than a serious competition. A great way to learn to make games. ]]> pygame.org Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:46:00 -0700 http://www.pygame.org/news.html This is a fun video controlling pygame with midi.