Original author(s) Preview release Mercurial repository | Developer(s) Pygame Community | |
Initial release 28 October 2000; 16 years ago (2000-10-28) Stable release 1.9.2 / 13 December 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-13) | ||
Pygame is a cross-platform set of Python modules designed for writing video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries designed to be used with the Python programming language.
Contents
History
Pygame was originally written by Pete Shinners to replace PySDL after its development stalled. It has been a community project since 2004 or 2005 and is released under the open source free software GNU Lesser General Public License.
Architecture and features
Pygame is built over the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library, with the intention of allowing real-time computer game development without the low-level mechanics of the C programming language and its derivatives. This is based on the assumption that the most expensive functions inside games (mainly the graphics part) can be abstracted from the game logic, making it possible to use a high-level programming language, such as Python, to structure the game.
Pygame applications can run on Android phones and tablets with the use of Pygame Subset for Android (pgs4a). Sound, vibration, keyboard, and accelerometer are supported on Android. There is no way to run Pygame applications on iOS. Another limitation of pgs4a is the lack of multi-touch support, which prevents the use of things like pinch to zoom and two-finger rotation. An alternative to using Pygame is to use the Kivy library, which includes multi-touch and iOS support.
Community
There is a regular competition, called PyWeek, to write games using Python (and usually but not necessarily, Pygame). The community has created many tutorials for Pygame.