About pygame

Pygame is a game development platform for python that handles a lot of the basic plumbing you need to implement in basic 2D or tile-based games.

Despite the name, though, it can be used for much more than gaming, and it includes many features that lend it to designing complex and easy to update UIs without having to get into all the details of X-Windows or some of the more complex UI frameworks like GTK, etc. Given the limited resources on the Pi (for an embedded Linux system), it can actually be advantageous to develop UIs with something like pygame since you have very little additional overhead compared to X-Windows, etc., and the learning curve is pretty flat.

There are also quite a few tutorials (and books!) out there to help you get started with pygame, with some of the following being a good starting point:

• Official pygame documentation
• pygame tutorials wiki
• A useful tutorial on fonts and sprites/images

Creating a New Project in the WebIDE

Be sure to see our Using the WebIDE tutorial for info on how to create a new file in the WebIDE.

Once you're up and running with the WebIDE, create a new project folder in my-pi-projects named 'pyscope'. Once you're inside this folder, create a file named 'pyscope.py'

Once this file is create, you're ready to get started with pygame and your display ...