Thought I'd revisit this thread with more of my thoughts on pygame and cocos2D (python).

They are both great. Pygame is much older, has a zillion libraries for it, but really has you do alot of things yourself.

Cocos2D has great code organization bits, like scenes and so forth, and actually sits on a few other libaries which makes things a bit... interesting. It relies on pyglet and pygame, to be specific.

I found my code was much cleaner and easier to deal with in cocos2D, but googling for answers only gets me reams of info on cocos2D for iPhone (Objective C).

The mailing list is really excellent, though, the main contributor answers nearly every question within the day. And if you're still stuck, you can look through the coco2D examples, cocos2D tests, or fuddle your way to the source, which, weirdly, has better documentation than the actual documentation.

Compiling is a bit of a hassle, I got a pretty good workflow going using py2Exe, from what I read, I need a Mac to make a Mac port, which makes sense, I suppose.

Hope this thread helps others deciding on a light, 2D framework.

Did the brothers of Double Dragon not fight against a cohesive gang? Or was just a random collection of ne'er-do-wells with an alarming weakness for elbows?

LOVE 2D
Polycode

But alot of those aren't really open source libraries, they are proprietary engines.

I was seriously considering Flixel, but I hear ppl complaining about Flash performance. It's also 'just kinda open', since the whole Flash thing is owned by the Adobe behemoth.

Have you hacked around with LOVE2D? How's Lua?

Polycode looks aces, thanks!

I'm looking for language+libraries that can target PCs/Macs.

IMO if you want to make 2D games in Python, then Pygame is definitely the best choice. You can also take a look at Rabbyt though, which is a sprite library using Pygame (or Pyglet) and it's written in Cython which means that it is fast as hell (it can manage thousands of sprites moving, changing colors, colliding with the edges of the screen).

I was reading up on Rabbyt, it looks pretty awesome, and fast.

Reading further, it looks like there's a cython binding for SFML, pySFML2, that would be blaaazing fast.

I'm having a ton of fun with pygame, hacking out crappy 2D games. I'm thinking about trying out another language/framework, and have read through the stickied topics, but wondering if there was something I may have missed.

Pygame:
Pros:
it's great! Light, open source, mainly does what I need it to do.
Cons:
I really have to do absolutely everything myself.

Cocos2D (not the 'Cocos2D for iPhone'):
Pros:
Light, open source, uses pyglet so I get some OpenGL goodness in there. Does a lot of things for me! Guis! No more blitting (from what I've read)!
Cons:
Looks to be a slight bear to install. There might be something even SUPER BETTERERERER out there.

So, I ask the TIGSource community, is there? Am I missing a really great 2D games library?

PS I'm not particularly attached to python.