Two game development "competitions" popular amongst the participate in are happening in April/May. Ludumdare 48h (from scratch, solo competition using any language) and Pyweek (one week, solo or teams, using python). Both are not about prizes, but are about a creative outlet for heaps of people making games at once around the world.

Ludum Dare 20 – April 29th-May 2nd Weekend

Find out more about Ludum Dare - "Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event. Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community."

Pyweek 12 – April 3rd-April 10th

Find out more about PyWeek - "Invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team. Is intended to be challenging and fun. Will hopefully increase the public body of game tools code and expertise. Will let a lot of people actually finish a game. May inspire new projects (with ready made teams!)"

Pygame has passed revision 3000 (**) in SVN! So what has changed. I have spent some time adding array struct interface support to pygame.mixer.Sound and pygame.Surface objects. For those unfamiliar with the array interface, it is a protocol designed by the NumPy people that describes an object's internal data as an array. Unlike the new buffer protocol introduced in Python 3, the array protocol is stable and is supported by NumPy in Python's 2.4 and 2.5. pygame.surfarray.blit_surface has used the array interface for awhile now.

Also added is the new pixelcopy module, which also works on array interfaces, and moves most of the Python code for handling NumPy in surfarray into C. This should provide some of the speedup that has been promised since the release of Pygame 1.9.0. It also adds new functionality, such as pixels_red, pixels_green, and pixels_blue to surfarray. The module is still being developed, but it fully implements existing surfarray functionality.

So if anyone is serious about using NumPy in their projects, please give the latest Pygame from SVN a try. I could use the feedback.

Lenard Lindstrom


(**) bb8 hex, 101110111000 binary, 149A base 13, ... (Okay, so it is meaningless in an of itself.)