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.

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/.