I finished my last exam for the year yesterday and so today I was ready to get programming again. I had thought I would probably play around with pyglet for a while, but as I was exploring the various options I ran into something called LÖVE. From the LÖVE website:

What is LÖVE?

LÖVE is a 2D game engine in which games can be made by using Lua scripts. Actually, it’s more like a framework or library, but “engine” sells much better. So we lie.

What makes LÖVE different?

LÖVE aims to be as easy to use as possible, but without the use of any graphical “game maker”. It has been compared with PyGame, but for Lua, and (hopefully) with a better distribution scheme.

So I’ve spent the better part of the day in LÖVE and I must say its been a rather enjoyable experience. It seems to have some very nice libraries to get game development done very quickly and the tutorials on the website have been very useful. Go to http://love2d.org/ for more info and to download. While you’re at it check out Geany as a great option for a Lua IDE.

I just wanted to mention two interesting python libraries I have recently discovered:
1. Pyglet
This seems to be replacing pygame as the best choice for making games in python. It uses OpenGL instead of SDL, which means faster games!

2. Pymunk
A port of the Chipmunk 2d physics engine to python. A recent PyWeek contest was based on the use of Chipmunk in python games.

I haven’t yet tried either of these myself, but they look very useful. I’ll keep you posted.