Pygame in All the Languages | Hacker News Reader

Pygame in All the Languages

pygame.org

40 pointsTomte15 comments

Anyone here have any experience with PyGame? Much as I love Godot, I've been wanting to have a go at some frameworks for some time, and as I already know Python it might be a good fit. That being said, I dont hear much positivity about it, and as shallow as I know this is, the general look of the website doesn't fill me with confidence. But its also been around for long enough and seems to have enough users, despite the competition that engines bring for new users, that it can't be all that bad.

PyGame is very basic- just a graphics library with some wrappers. Personally, not a fan of it though Im primarily a Python programmer.

I dont use Javascript much, but Phaser is a joy to use and I wish we had something like that in Python. There is Arcade, but they keep breaking the code.

Godot-- I liked for simple cases and games, but it became very hard for complex projects (Ive heard the same complaint about Unity)

Pygame might be basic, but I remember it as being the single best/easiest tool for interfacing with (USB) MIDI-instruments - I remember it being really easy to whip up scripts to take MIDI input from a keyboard, mess with them, and present them as a new MIDI-device. I never used it for games (I'm a game developer), but for specifically the case of MIDI it was great. Make of that what you will!

I wrote a script recently that identifies chords from MIDI input, and, even though I'd have preferred not to use a game framework, Pygame turned out to be the easiest way by far of handling the MIDI stuff.

ahah glad to know someone else found its secret superpower :)

> PyGame is very basic- just a graphics library with some wrappers

I remember using it to interface with a game pad (xbox controller) too. The first two things I wrote in python were complete by small games (e.g. tetris clone with accurate rules, and an entry for Ludum Dare) and it had everything I needed.

Yeah, I've done some useful things with pygame. My game business almost entirely uses Unity, but I do find that Python is helpful for tool development as, like you, I know the language well. Often it's a lot speedier to write a quick visual tool in Python that generates a bunch of json data that gets loaded in as a text asset and parsed, than it is to write the same thing as an editor plugin (at least for me!) Using Python + pygame or Python + PySDL2[0] gets you rendering stuff on the screen and receiving input, fast.

I've also used the Twisted Matrix[1] for some online TCP-based game server work, and that was pretty positive, though the library is quite daunting to figure out. That was 8 years ago though, perhaps there are better libraries nowadays.

Writing an entire game in Python might be an uphill struggle though. The interpreter is really slow, so a JIT alternative like Pypy[2] is very necessary. On my game server project I remember having to use a combination of Pypy and writing the tightest inner-most parts of my simulation loop in Cython to get the server tick to the target. As much as I love Python, if you're comfortable with Godot, it's probably a better long term investment with fewer headaches along the way.

[0] - https://pypi.org/project/PySDL2/

[1] - https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/

[2] - https://www.pypy.org/

The nicest part about using PySDL2 directly is that it uses ctypes, so you don't have to worry about compiling an extension module from CPython to SDL, which is often the most broken part of PyGame. PyGame IMO is a tire fire of frustration around installing it, then using it as the parameters are haphazard and ill documented.

I already have SDL2 installed via homebrew on my M1 mac. It literally took 10 seconds to clone the PySDL2 repo, `pip install .` and run the helloworld.py example that renders a test image to the screen.

I have had a heck of a time trying to update pygame when running on a raspberry pi, and since it wasn't critical (mostly displaying a splash screen and QR code) am looking into replacing it.

It's great for teaching kids / teaching yourself / experimenting with game engine / concept stuff.

It has image loading / blitting on screen, etc, input, etc, and you can do a lot with it, but it will be all pretty manual. Which can be a lot of fun. But it's not a "framework" like django is a web-framework. It doesn't give you any higher abstractions at all (sprites, animations, objects, maps / levels, etc...)

I like it, for teaching my son to code, having fun hacking easy oldschool 2d games in it.

Another more "modern" alternative might be https://love2d.org/ - I've played with it a few years ago briefly, and may well look at it again some day. It certainly seems to have a more active community than pygame - but is `lua` not `python`.

Neither have the greatest distribution / mobile story in the world, there are... options... worth checking that stuff before choosing a system to build in if that's important to you.

Depending on what you want to do, Arcade (https://api.arcade.academy/en/latest/) may be a good option too. I enjoy using it for my simple projects.

Never heard of it. Thanks for sharing. How does it compare to PyGame?

Arcade has, in my opinion, better documentation and some useful features like tile map support and a physics engine. The developers of Arcade provide a more detailed comparison in this page: https://api.arcade.academy/en/latest/pygame_comparison.html

* Human languages, not programming languages

I too thought it was gonna programming languages…

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