building games with pygame introduction pygame is cross-platformfree and open source python library designed to make building multimedia applications such as games easy development of pygame started back in october with pygame version being released six months later the version of pygame discussed in this is version if you have later version check to see what changes have been made to see if they have any impact on the examples presented here pygame is built on top of the sdl library sdl (or simple directmedia layeris cross platform development library designed to provide access to audiokeyboardsmousejoystick and graphics hardware via opengl and direct to promote portabilitypygame also supports variety of additional backends including windibx linux frame buffer etc sdl officially supports windowsmac os xlinuxios and android (although other platforms are unofficially supportedsdl itself is written in and pygame provides wrapper around sdl howeverpygame adds functionality not found in sdl to make the creation of graphical or video games easier these functions include vector mathscollision detection sprite scene graph managementmidi supportcamerapixel array manipulationtransformationsfilteringadvanced freetype font support and drawing the remainder of this introduces pygamethe key conceptsthe key modulesclasses and functions and very simple first pygame application the next steps through the development of simple arcade style video game which illustrates how game can be created using pygame (cspringer nature switzerland ag huntadvanced guide to python programmingundergraduate topics in computer science