Starting to make games using Pygame open-source projects is enjoyable and satisfying. As a fellow programmer, I enjoy building interactive games and unleashing creativity. In this guide, I will introduce you to some great Pygame open-source projects suitable for all skill levels. Whether you’re a beginner wanting to learn coding or an experienced developer seeking fresh challenges, these projects offer an ideal starting point. Let’s explore together and start our journey into the exciting world of game development!

What is Pygame?

Pygame is a collection of Python modules for video game development. It offers additional functionality on top of the SDL library, enabling you to create fully-functional games easily. If you want to become a game developer, learning Pygame is an excellent way to start. It helps you explore various avenues of programming as well. If you are a beginner and interested to learn more about data science, check out our data science training from top universities.

Pygame is free to use and runs on nearly every operating system and platform. It is widely popular, and developers have submitted many projects on its website. Several Pygame games have received awards too.

Top Pygame Open Source Projects

Here are our top Pygame open source project ideas:

1. Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird was a huge trend several years ago. It was a simple game with a click (or tap) based UI. The player controls the flight of a bird, which jumps in the air whenever the player taps. Seemingly simple, Flappy Bird takes some time to master and is quite challenging. In this project, you can create a game of Flappy Bird by using Pygame. This game has straightforward mechanics, which makes it perfect for a beginner. Even if you don’t have much experience in game development, you’d quickly complete this project. 

On the other hand, if you’re an experienced Pygame developer, then you can take this project a step further by developing a model that plays this game automatically. You’d have to utilize reinforcement learning algorithms here, but you’d have a working model that can beat anyone’s high score in Flappy Bird by the end of it. You can take inspiration from FlaPy Bird (yes, that’s the name), which is Flappy Bird in Pygame. 

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2. Create the Famous Snake Game in Pygame

If you had a Nokia phone in the 2000s, you must have played the famous snake game. It’s also available on Google Play Games as a Google product. In the snake game, the player controls a snake which gains points by eating fruits present on the screen. The snake grows every time it eats fruit and 

This simple yet exciting game requires quite a bit of effort to develop. If you’re a beginner, you should build a simple snake game by using Pygame. However, if you’re an advanced programmer, you can make it more challenging by modifying the traditional game. For example, you can add unique power-ups to the game or randomize obstacles.

The snake game is among the most popular Pygame open source project ideas among developers. As you would have noticed, it’s a fantastic project for beginners and advanced programmers alike. Here’s a Snake game in Pygame you can take inspiration from.

3. Create Sudoku Games

Sudoku is a puzzle game where you have a 9×9 grid. The grid has nine squares, and you have to enter 1-9 digits in every square, row, and column. Sudoku’s catch is that the player can’t repeat a number in a row, column or square. You can develop a sudoku generator in Pygame. The generator would create a Sudoku game according to the player’s preferred difficulty level. The difficulty level of a Sudoku game is based on the pre-entered numbers.

A straightforward game would have many of its blocks pre-filled, and their quantity would reduce as the difficulty increases. You can also create a sudoku generator where the generated game only has one solution. However, it would be a bit more challenging than creating a simple Sudoku generator. Once finished, you can start challenging your friends and peers to a game of Sudoku!

4. Build a Retro Racing Game

Remember those 16-bit racing games? You can build one of those in Pygame as your project! In such games, the player controls a vehicle in a 2D or 3D setting the car’s speed increases as the level progress. The road has obstacles present, which would lose the player a life or end the game if the player hits one of them. 

Creating a retro racing game will help you explore many capabilities of Pygame and Python. If you’re a beginner, you can create one level with basic features (obstacles, turns, etc.). You can make the project more complicated by adding power-ups and additional assets to the game (other vehicles, levels, etc.). 

It is an excellent method to explore the object physics in game development. Moreover, it’s a great starting point if you want to work on racing games in the future. Here is one of the Pygame open source projects on this topic.

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5. Quabro – Open Source Block Breaker 

Quabro is an arcade game that lets the player control four different paddles on every side of the screen. The objective here is to destroy all the blocks present on the screen by hitting them with a ball. The ball shouldn’t escape the screen; otherwise, the player would lose. You can direct the ball by hitting it with one of the four paddles on the screen. 

It is one of the Pygame open source projects present on the official Pygame.org site. Quabro has 20 levels, five items which remain hidden in blocks and the player obtains them by destroying the latter, and five difficulty levels. The difficulty levels affect the game’s speed and score. You can build a similar block breaker and take inspiration from Quabro. Block breakers make for great project ideas because they offer a lot of creative liberty to the developer. Learn more about Quabro here. 

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Final Thoughts

I trust you found this compilation of Pygame open-source projects helpful. If you have any questions or feedback regarding this article, please share them in the comments section below. Your input is invaluable to me. 

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