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[Alfonso Crawford]

  I'm having some trouble getting a rectangle to be a little see-through. I'm only rendering basic Pygame-rectangles, right now, so I feel really silly. Any help is apprectiated!

[george]

I don't use Pygame but from a quick look at the docs you might just need to set the alpha value of the color you're drawing with, like

Color.a

      Gets or sets the alpha value of the Color.

With Pygame you need to set the color before you draw something, right?

[Gold Cray]

This thing does some alpha stuff with a large black surface toward the end.

[Alfonso Crawford]

  I already tried messing with the alpha-channel, via setting a pygame.Color-object's alpha to a myriad of values: I had no luck.

  I can't open TAR.GZ-files, on this PC. Damn.

[george]

OK, I got a minimal example working. However I noticed while doing so I still only have Pygame 1.8, while that Color module on their docs page is for 1.8.1.

Code:

import pygame, sys
from pygame.locals import * 

pygame.init()

black = 0, 0, 0
surface = pygame.Surface((200, 100))

surface.fill((255, 255, 255))

surface.set_alpha(100)

screen = pygame.display.set_mode((600, 400))

while 1:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT: sys.exit()
    screen.fill(black)
    screen.blit(surface, (100, 100))
    pygame.display.flip()

You should see a grayish rectangle on a black screen. Play with surface.set_alpha to see the results. Note there seems to be at least two (maybe three?) different ways to set alpha values, for different reasons -- read up on the Surface module section of the docs. 

You can do a lot of stuff with Pygame but things like this are partly what made pyglet more attractive for me.

[Alfonso Crawford]

  I apologize for taking so long to express my thanks, george! I never would have guessed to overlap surfaces, as opposed to my direct-draw approach! Testing is going very smoothly, now. Thanks!