Pygame Zero 1.1 is released today! Pygame Zero is a zero-boilerplate games programming framework for education.
This release brings a number of bug fixes and usability enhancements, as well as one or two new features. The full changelog is available in the documentation, but here are a couple of the highlights for me:
- A new spell checker will point out hook or parameter names that have been misspelled when the program starts. This goes towards helping beginner programmers understand what they have done wrong in cases where normally no feedback would be given.
- We fixed a really bad bug on Mac OS X where Pygame Zero's window can't be focused when it is installed in a virtualenv.
- Various contributors have contributed open-source implementations of classic retro games using Pygame Zero. This is an ongoing project, but there are now implementations of Snake, Pong, Lunar Lander and Minesweeper included in the examples/ directory. These can be used as a reference or turned into course material for teaching with Pygame Zero.
Pygame Zero was well-received at Europython. Carrie-Anne Philbin covered Pygame Zero in her keynote; I gave a lightning talk introducing the library and its new spellchecker features; and the sprints introduced several new collaborators to the project, who worked to deliver several of the features and bugfixes that are being released today.
A big thank you to everyone who helped make this release happen!