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.

This is a fun video controlling pygame with midi.

update: here is a video of a custom kick drum and synth using pygame as audio and midi library.

Drumroll... and the winners are:
  Individual: Topologiquill
 Team: After the Fall

Congratulations to everyone who entered! The theme for this pyweek was "Feather"

At the launch of the N900 PUSH project at the onedotzero festival in London, Tinker.it! and Hyper had an exhibition using the a new linux(Maemo) based phone from nokia. Their exhibition used pygame for some parts. You can read more details on the nokia blog.

'PyCon UK 2009 will be held on Saturday 5th September at the CBSO Centre, Birmingham.

Pycon UK 2009 is an UnConference. This means that the delegates arrange the schedule on the day. There's no submission process, and no schedule. You turn up with whatever material you wish to present, you choose which talks are given and which workshops are held on the day.'

It's only £10 if you pre-book. http://pyconuk.org/booking.html. If you're planning on going, please pre-book now, so the organisers have a better idea of numbers.

More information can be found about the unconference at the website: http://www.pyconuk.org/. It would be a nice cheap venue for those around the uk, and europe to meet up and talk about python game/multimedia stuff.

A quick bugfix release has been made to correct a problem with a missing readme.html file in the source release, and setuptools based installs dying when the readme.html file wasn't there.

What's new (heaps of things since 1.8.1): http://www.pygame.org/whatsnew.shtml

Summary of changes:
  - many, many fixes and improvements. The largest amount of changes has gone into this release than any other pygame release.
  - bug fixes for backwards compatibility issues introduced in pygame 1.8.x series. old games like solarwolf and libraries like PGU work again.
  - experimental camera webcam module (still in development).
  - experimental midi module based on portmidi and pyportmidi (99% complete).
  - experimental gfxdraw module based on SDL_gfx (including AA circles, textured polygons and other goodness).
  - python3, and python3.1 support mostly completed. Some modules still remain to be completed - but mostly it's working.
  - nokia mobile phone s60 support.
  - improved OSX support (dropped pyobjc dependency, improved installer, sysfont now works on OSX).
  - pygame.examples + pygame.tests included with pygame. This makes testing easier, and also makes learning pygame more fun and easy.
  - cleanup of examples, and addition of new examples.
  - new tools to aid in development of pygame itself, better compilation documentation.
  - py2app, and py2exe support improved.


Files are up on the download page.

The 15th Ludumdare 48hour-from-scratch-solo game development competition is coming to the webs near you.

Read the full announcement here:http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/07/23/ludum-dare-15-august-28th-30th-weekend/.

The date for the ninth PyWeek challenge has been set:

Sunday 30th August to Sunday 6th September (00:00UTC to 00:00UTC)

The PyWeek challenge invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team. Entries must be developed in Python, during the challenge, and must incorporate some theme chosen at the start of the challenge.

REGISTRATION IS NOT YET OPEN --

Registration will open one month before the start date. See the competition timetable and rules:
http://www.pyweek.org/9/

pgreloaded (Pygame2) is an ongoing rewrite of the Pygame multimedia and game framework. As Pygame, it's purpose is to make writing multimedia applications, such as games, with Python as easy as possible, while providing the developer a reliable and extensible programming interface. It features a modular and loosely coupled package and module layout and access to the most features of the libraries it wraps.

pgreloaded can be installed side-by-side with Pygame as it uses a different package namespace and thus will not cause any conflicts with another Pygame installation.

The source and documentation packages as well as prebuilt Win32 installers are available from http://code.google.com/p/pygame/downloads/list

This is an alpha release for testing purposes and not meant to be run in production environments. pgreloaded is not backwards compatible with pygame - and work on pygame is still continuing.

pgreloaded (Pygame2) is an ongoing rewrite of the Pygame multimedia and game framework. As Pygame, it's purpose is to make writing multimedia applications, such as games, with Python as easy as possible, while providing the developer a reliable and extensible programming interface. It features a modular and loosely coupled package and module layout and access to the most features of the libraries it wraps.

pgreloaded can be installed side-by-side with Pygame as it uses a different package namespace and thus will not cause any conflicts with another Pygame installation.

The source and documentation packages as well as prebuilt Win32 installers are available from http://code.google.com/p/pygame/downloads/list

This is an alpha release for testing purposes and not meant to be run in production environments.

I have put together a video representing some of the pygame work out there.

Enjoy!

--Rene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu2Tuo3HPbo

It was an amazing selection process this year and we received a lot of proposals and applications. Thanks a lot to all of you who applied! In the end, we received 3 slots from the PSF and now have three paid students working on their proposals during the GSoC.

• Tyler Laing will improve the movie support in pygame, by adding an ffmpeg-based module (blog).

• Vicent Marti will improve font handling using the freetype library (blog).

• Werner Laurensse will improve the new camera module and add MacOS X support for it (blog).

Besides that several applicants volunteered to work on their proposals even though they were not chosen. This was far ahead of our expectations and the prospected outcome of this year's summer will give pygame a major push forward.

There were also a number of SDL related proposals that were accepted. (more details on SDL accepted proposals)

• Enhance International Input Support for Mac OS X
• International Input (X11)
• Automated Testing Suite for SDL
• Playstation3 Port

The yearly Google Summer of Code is about to start and pygame wants to participate again this year.

We still have a lot of projects to do, so if you are a student and interested in working on and with pygame, talk to us on the . If none of the various projects matches your interest, but you have some outstanding idea on how to improve pygame, just discuss that with us and let's see how we can get it done together.

If you need any sort of help, or just want to shoot the breeze, you can most anytime find people in the pygame IRC channel.

Server: irc.freenode.net Port: 6667 (default) Channel: #pygame Link: irc://irc.freenode.net/pygame

Stop on by and have a chat about your projects...