PyDark – 2D Game Framework
pydark.com
pydark.com
Its a terrible, buggy, crash prone obsolete framework.
Learning pygame may teach you basic skills you can transfer to other better frameworks; but it teaches you 10 year old skills that are largely irrelevant on modern hardware, and gives you a rubbish introduction to python (welcome to segfault hell).
Kivy is good too, but honestly, my feeling at the moment after trying all these frameworks is that in general python is poorly suited to high performance simulations; familiarity with the SDL2 api will help bridge the gap to using a different language which uses an SDL2 backend.
I mean, geez, just open Unity or UE4 and look at the features either has. You won't find them in pygame.
However, my real complaint is that pygame is so widely talked about and used, no one has made something better, they've just sort of tacked more and more rubbish as extensions onto pygame.
(oh, and that it crashes all the time, but you could argue the same for the 32-bit editor in unity)
As one example of its shortcomings, Pygame doesn't seem to support hardware rendering and the maintainer seems to think this is an advantage [ http://www.pygame.org/docs/tut/newbieguide.html ]
I suppose I just picked up on the writer's ceaseless discouragement of using hardware rendering and interpreted that as a sign that it didn't support it instead of fully reading what was written.
Edit: To be clear, you can make games in vanilla kivy just fine (and it's probably much more performant than pygame), but kivent is a dedicated game engine with more efficient graphics internals and nice things like chipmunk integration.
I wish bundling Python was easier. I read this morning in the Kivy docs that you can't even bundle python 3 at all yet.
Many years ago a friend of mine wrote a Python binding to the PopCap engine. It was so great, the exe and the script. Thats all you needed and you could just whack those two things in a zip and you're done.
It wasn't clear to me how hard it would be to incorporate something like Pymunk for physics though. One thing that I find a pain when using Pymunk and Pygame is having to keep track of the your rects when things are bumping off of each other, spinning, etc. It'd be cool if Pydark had built in support for some kind of physics engine.
Who thought that could possibly be a good idea?
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/2ufo9y/the_2d_game_f...
I do like the concept/design of it though.