ABS Engine is switching to pygame-ce

[Natuworkguy]

ABS Engine is switching to pygame-ce

ABS Engine is starting the move from pygame to pygame-ce as the supported runtime dependency.

ABS Engine is a public 2D game engine from Above and Below Studios, and a lot of its day-to-day workflow is built around the pygame API. Our scripting docs already expose things like pygame.event.Event, pygame.Rect, and keyboard constants directly to game scripts, so this dependency choice affects both engine internals and the scripting layer that projects build on.

Why we’re making the change:

• pygame-ce is the dependency we want to support going forward
• It keeps the familiar import pygame workflow, which should keep the transition low-friction for existing scripts
• It gives ABS Engine a clearer path for ongoing maintenance as the project grows

What changes right now:

• Fresh installs should use pygame-ce
• requirements.txt now reflects that switch
• Most existing ABS Engine projects should not need script rewrites just because of this dependency change

If you already have pygame installed locally, use:

• pip uninstall pygame
• pip install -r requirements.txt

What is not changing:

• The core scripting model: init, update, and event
• Entity rendering, including image-backed entities
• The general project workflow, whether you are working with game.absp, attaching scripts, or running the engine through run.pyw

This is the start of the transition, not the end of it. We’ll keep aligning the rest of the repo and docs so pygame-ce becomes the consistent default everywhere.

If you test the switch and notice regressions, the most useful reports right now are around:

• window creation and input handling
• image loading and rendering
• entity scripts that depend on pygame events or key constants
• cross-platform setup issues