Searching my archives, looks like I first encountered pygame over 16 years ago 😲! pygame subsequently served me well for experimenting with generative art in Python.
Back in 2023, a post from Diego Crespo, about drama in the pygame community, came across my transom.
At over 20 years old, Pygame is one of the most widely used Python libraries for game development. It has inspired many beginners and hobbyists to learn Python and create their own games, including myself. It’s also used in schools for educational purposes, for quick prototyping of game mechanics, and multimedia applications. But recently it was forked2. At first this shouldn’t seem unusual, because as of the time of writing, it has over 2.6k forks. People fork open source projects all the time, to contribute code, to make their own experimental changes, or just for fun. But this fork is different, as it is led by many of the core maintainers of the original project. The forked version of Pygame is called Pygame Community Edition (Pygame CE).
At the time, I duly noted the occurrence but was off doing other things and didn’t take any action.
However, with the benefit of improvements in the Python ecosystem and my own abilities, I’m contemplating revisiting my ancient peyote repository for generative art noodling. pygame Community Edition (Pygame-ce) seems to have a lively community that’s keeping pygame up to date with the changes in Python.
Pygame is a free and open-source cross-platform library for the development of multimedia applications like video games using Python. It uses the Simple DirectMedia Layer library and several other popular libraries to abstract the most common functions, making writing these programs a more intuitive task.
This distribution is called ‘pygame - Community Edition’ (‘pygame-ce’ for short).
It is a fork of the upstream pygame project by its former core developers, and was created after impossible challenges prevented them from continuing development upstream. The new distribution aims to offer more frequent releases, continuous bugfixes and enhancements, and a more democratic governance model.
It’ll definitely have to be part of the next steps.