The next PyWeek, a challenge to write a game using Python, starts on April 14. Registration is now open and voting for the theme of this contest commences on April 7.

PyWeek is a bi-annual contest established in 2005 by Richard Jones and this April's contest will be the 16th staging of the event.

This is a contest in which the participants are involved in choosing the theme and, having spent seven days creating their games, also get to decide the winners by playing and voting on the other submissions for Fun, Innovation and Production (graphics, sound, polish). There are no prizes - this is one contest that you enter, either as an individual or as a team for the fun of it and the honor of getting a high ranking.

The idea is to write a game that is challenging and fun within a week - and to ensure that participants don't take longer the game must incorporate the selected theme.The game must be written in Python although you can use supporting languages (eg. C or C++ libraries, Javascript in HTML web pages, and so on).

The game must be written from scratch and this means you are not allowed to use a personal "library" codebase although you can use existing libraries that have available for at least one month before the challenge (and are well documented) and which do not implement any game logic. The entire PyGame library is OK to use, as are PIL, PyOpenGL, PyODE, PyOGRE, etc -- all the libraries listed in the python.org PythonGameLibraries wiki page. You can also use code from the pygame.org cookbook.

One goal of the contest is to increase the public body of python game tools, code and expertise and to inspire new projects. 

Given how popular learning Python seems to be, this contest seems like a great opportunity to try out new skills.