Pygame Reloaded 2.0.0-alpha5 was released.

You can get more information at the pgreloaded page.

Simon Wittber talks about "Hard Real-time Python, or, Giant Robots of Doom."

Chris McCormick's talk on Python in Video Games and Multimedia Projects - at PyCon Australia.

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.

Javascript in recent years has been getting better and better, and now is a way better language than python. So to keep up with the times pygame has been rewritten for javascript. Please prepare your codebase with the py2js tool, which tries to automatically convert your python code into javascript.

Hopefully with a few years everyone will have upgraded their code, and it will be wonderful. I hope you all will enjoy this change to javascript. Further news, and release binaries to be announced *very* soon.
As can be seen by the April 1st date... this was a joke. hahaha.

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.

Europython is coming up again. Currently early bird rates are still on (I think until the end of this week).

It's based in the uk (Birmingham) And is on the 17th to 22nd of July 2010. With 17th-18th being tutorial days, and 23rd/24th being sprint days. Richard Jones from pyweek is making a presentation... plus hopefully other graphics/games coders (like you!, maybe Rene and other pygame people?). Hopefully this year will have a really good game/graphics/audio/multimedia part of the conference. If you want to make a presentation, you can make submissions at: http://www.europython.eu/submission/. Accepted speakers get registration at the early bird rate. Rates are: (£120 early, £120 student, £320 corporate, £120 accepted speaker).

Full details on the Europython website.

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!)

London: london code dojo. Thursday 4th of March '10 18:30 – 21:30 (ish). You need to book for this... since there is free pizza and beer. A coding dojo where a text adventure is being made as a group (of about 30). Full details via the link.

San Francisco: pygamesf.org. Tuesday March 2nd 6pm. A meetup, with some talks. Including one from sjbrown, and one about embedding python for audio processing. Full details via the link.

Melbourne: Melbourne python users group meets monthly. Next meeting is 12th of April. Full details via the link.

If you know of any other python game related meetups(or python meetups with some people that are interested in game/graphics/audio/etc related things) please email the details to the mailing list, or to Rene Dudfield (renesd AT gmail DOT com) to be posted on the news section.

the server has been upgraded/reinstalled. Things should go back to normal in a few days as remaining issues are fixed.

Pygame Reloaded 2.0.0-alpha3 was released.

You can get more information at the pgreloaded wiki page.

Ludum Dare #16 is this upcoming December 11th-13th Weekend.

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.