Roadmap

Pygame Zero is an open source project, and as with any such project, the development roadmap is subject to change.

This document just lays out some goals for future releases, but there is no guarantee that these targets will be hit.

Translations

Pygame Zero is aimed at young users, whose English skills might not be good enough to read the documentation if it isn’t in their own language.

Adding translations of the documentation would help to bring Pygame Zero to new users. This is something that needs contributors to help with. My own language skills aren’t good enough!

Please see the translating guide if you think you can help.

Gamepad Support

Github Issue: #70

SNES-style gamepads are now extremely cheap. For example, they are sold for a few pounds from the Pi Hut, in packs of 2 at Amazon, and even in some Raspberry Pi bundles.

Gamepad support should not be limited to these specific models; rather, we should treat this as a lowest-common-denominator across modern gamepads, as nearly all more modern gamepads have at least as many buttons and axes.

This feature needs to be added in a way that will not require a gamepad to play any Pygame Zero game, in order to follow the principle of Make it accessible.

Surface juggling

Github Issue: #71

Pygame experts make lots of use of off-screen surfaces to create interesting effects.

Pygame Zero chose to consider only the screen surface, which we wrap with a richer Screen API for drawing, etc.

The problem is that there is no easy path to using additional surfaces - Pygame Zero immediately becomes dead weight as you start to look past that curtain.

We should look to smooth out this path to make Pygame Zero Actors and Screen work better with custom surfaces.

Storage

Github Issue: #33

It would be useful for users to be able to save and load data.

The obvious application is save games, but saving and loading whole games can be pretty hard to get right. The simpler application would just be saving settings, customisations, high scores, or the highest level reached.

Python of course has APIs for reading and writing files, but this has additional complexity that teachers might not want to teach immediately.