Note: PPB has now been released. You can get it by visiting its page.

Rather than wait, I’m releasing some screenshots of this wonderful little tool I’ve been working on. This is something that I’ve been coding on and off, for the last few months. Given so little spare time that I have, it was refreshing to go back and actually get it (nearly) working.

Pygame Package Builder (PPB) is a GUI and command-line tool for automating the tedious process of compiling and packaging up your pygame-based project into a working executable. Right now PPB targets Windows, but the underlying code will ultimately be able to target Macs with the py2app module.

Basically, you create a project file which gives basic information on your game and some optimization features. These features are safe for pygame, so you won’t get any more errors about missing this or that module from pygame.

But wait, there’s more! You can add in directory wildcards, so all of your extra data files can also be included in the packaging process at no extra charge.

Now, you can build from within PPB itself, or you can alternately use the command-line tool, which uses the same engine code to build projects. Which means you can also use it as part of an even larger build process without much hassle.

That said, it’s almost working. There are a few small nitpicking bugs and one more feature I want to add in that will make it more feature-complete from my own perspective. This was built out of my own needs, but I quickly saw it as something useful that the Pygame community could use.

And now for some screenshots. Click on each to enlarge.

Basic game information here

Set packaging options safely for Pygame without the guesswork

Add folders with wildcards for certain files, or add individual extra files

Build your project right from within the GUI, or use the same project file with the CLI tool

The heart of this whole tool is trying to help automate the process for you, the pygame programmer, so you can easily and quickly make binary packages for release to the world, without having the mess with or have innate knowledge of the guts of distutils. Stay tuned, because I hope to have it up here and on pygame.org here soon.