News

The date for the second PyWeek challenge has been set: Sunday 26th March to Sunday 2nd April (00:00UTC to 00:00UTC).

The PyWeek challenge invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team. Entries must be developed in Python, during the challenge, and must incorporate some theme chosen at the start of the challenge.

Python Game Programming Challenge

The PyGame Wiki has been added to the site. Check it out! Now you can help maintain pygame.org. Most of the main pages have been added to the wiki.

The highly-demanded Resources page was also added. It is a page for linking to free image and graphic resources for games.

ShredWheat (Pete) has provided the website with new documentation, and philhassey has modified them to allow for user submitted comments.

The user submitted comments should be used for:

• Examples
• Helpful hints, tips, and tricks
• Further explanation / documentation

The user submitted comments should NOT be used for:

• Bug Reports (see our new Bug Reports link on the side)
• Feature Requests
• Questions

Hope you enjoy the new docs!

iDevGames, the Macintosh game developer website, announced today the first "OMG Cup," sponsored by Freeverse Software. Open to any and all game developers, the contest seeks to identify the best original Mac games (OMG). The OMG Cup is designed to help developers successfully release their games and to help the Mac game market evolve with innovative new game concepts. All qualifying entrants will receive a free game from Freeverse Software, and the top three finalists will be awarded cash prizes. The first place winner will also receive an option to turn their winning entry into a finished product -- either as a shareware or retail product.

Contest starts October 18, 2005 and ends November 28, 2005. You can find more information here.

PyWeek Programming Challenge

The date for the first PyWeek challenge has been set: Sunday August 28 to Sunday September 4 (00:00UTC to 00:00UTC), 2005.

The challenge timetable (all events at 00:00 UTC):

See the rules page for more details about how the challenge works.

Welcome

The new pygame website was deployed for public use. I hope you find the new interface and features enjoyable. If you have any suggestions, please send them to philhassey@yahoo.com

Thanks

Special thanks to the pygame mailing list and irc for their help in both beta testing the site and giving some great suggestions. Thanks also go to the seul.org folks for hosting this site and for making some server changes so that the new pygame site could be hosted.

Participate

One of the main reasons I build this website was so I could contribute back to the pygame community, and so that it would be easier for others to contribute to the community. Here are some ways you can help the pygame community grow:

• Add Projects! - Sign Up and you can post all your in-development and new pygame projects. We really want to see what people are using pygame for, and the new site allows people to do that.
• Compete! - There are a few upcoming game competitions. I believe both of them are pygame / python specific. See the previous news articles for more information.

The goal of Game in a Day is to write a game in one day using PyGame.

GID14 takes place on the weekend of Saturday 16th July / Sunday 17th July 2005 in the #gameinaday channel on irc.maxgaming.net (port 7778). The theme will be Ghosts.

http://www.gameinaday.com/

The date for the first PyWeek challenge has been set: Sunday August 28 to Sunday September 4 (00:00UTC to 00:00UTC), 2005.

The PyWeek competition:

• Invites all Python programmers to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team,
• Must be challenging and fun,
• Entries must be developed during the competition, and must incorporate some theme decided at the start of the competition,
• Will hopefully increase the public body of python game tools, code and expertise,
• Will let a lot of people actually finish a game, and
• May inspire new projects (with ready made teams!)

The competition timetable (all events at 00:00 UTC):

See the PyWeek website for more information and rules.

The site is pretty much ready to be deployed to pygame.org. Some of the changes are

• imported all old projects
• members can "claim" old projects -- if you were a maintainer of a older project, please sign up and goto that project's page. on that page you can click a link to have the project added to your projects.
• cleaned up HTML on old pages
• sub divided games into Arcade, Puzzle, Strategy, Other
• added a members box (which includes relevant links for members)
• set up the screenshot page to show screenshots from some recent releases

Please take a look at the site. If you find any problems, please mention them.

Please Sign Up for an account and add some of your pygame projects. If we get a good section of the projects added to the website, we will be able to deploy the new site fairly soon.

Changes:

• Sign Up / etc
• Various bug fixes
• Various look enhancements
• Better form validation

The site has been testing using most modern browsers. If you have any specific troubles, please feel free to mention them. (Please note that the "behind the password" parts of the site will probably not work with older browsers.)

I hope you enjoy the updated site.

Here it is. Take a look around, and post comments on the mailing list. For most people, I suggest looking at the Users View section below, logging in as test, and try posting a new project to see if you like the interface. For those who might be in charge of the site, check out the Admin View and browse around.

Site View

Take a look around. The site contains several parts. Right now you are looking at the news section. To the left you can see links to other general information. Below that are the project categories. And on the right is a list of recent project releases.

I have added several of my pygame projects throughout the project categories.

Admin View

The admin view gives control of users / groups / skins / modules / folders / top level pages / news / categories / projects. The tabs of main interest are probably users / top / news / categories / projects. This area of the site will only be used by the web site team.

To see the admin view go here and login as admin / password.

During the demo phase, this section will not alllow any kind of editing. Just browse around.

Users View

The users view allows the user to add projects and update them with new releases.

To see the users view go here and login as test / password.

Final Notes

If everyone enjoys the site, I will proceed with some final work on it -- adding user sign up, allow user to modify their profile, etc. Suggestions are welcome.