I'm currently learning pygame (very new to it) and I might be able to participate in LD43. But I haven't done anything like this and highly highly doubt that I can do anything within the time frame (specially Compo where you gotta make everything yourself and in less time). Anyway these are my suggestions:

I intend to participate in LD43, but as preparation in the past few days I've read a lot about the requirements and nightmares accompanying LGPL 2.1 license (which pygame and SDL 1.2 are based on). Now I'm doubting if I can actually publish the binary of my game, because it is just too much legal bullcrap to consider and work for, especially taking into account the fact that I have never published anything and am very new to pygame in general. I can publish the source code on Github with whatever license I want (MIT) if I just list pygame and any other library as a dependency and put the links and instructions on how to install them. So to the question... can I just post source code of my game instead of a binary? Or that will not actually count? I am aware that fewer people can/will play it because it is harder than a simple binary but will it count as my submission?

I have read the LD rules weeks before doing this and re-read them before the jam started and it said you can have any base-code before starting. But I stumbled upon some older posts where people said you have to make that base-code available before the jam starts. There is no such thing in the rules. All it says is I should make the source available later. So I just wanted to make sure. I've written 2 classes just for menu buttons and sliders before the jam and wanted to use them.

Although I failed my very first attempt in an LDjam I am extremely happy I participated. The weeks of preparation beforehand and the 2 days I was working on the "game" were not in any way wasted. I don't see myself as an optimist at all but I have no negative feelings associated with this experience. Here is a list of great things I took away from attempting this challenge:
1. I made a fun little space shoot them up game beforehand with pygame so I could see if I can actually do it. That game will be ready and waiting for any future polishing and modification. 2. Because I was going to participate in the Compo, I knew I had to publish the source code for this game. So I looked for a tutorial on Git. After watching a 30 minute video I knew all I needed to implement it. And you know what? It is one of the easiest and greatest things I should have learned months ago. Now any future project of mine will start with git init. 3. Pygame is an open source python library licensed under "LGPL 2.1". Because I had to publish the binaries of my game, I needed to know what that meant. It took many many hours to grasp it fully but after reading the docs, TL;DRs, looking at Q&As, and re-checking it over and over, I now know enough about it that I can not worry about any future licensing issues with pygame or any other LGPL software or library for that matter. Although I have to say I really dislike GPL and LGPL licenses and was thinking of MIT license for my source code which is far more suited to my taste. 4. To make the actual binaries I turned to PyInstaller which turns out works pretty well with pygame and many other libraries. I leaned how to publish for Windows and Linux from my Ubuntu-Mate machine. But unfortunately no MacOS, because I don't have one, nor could get "darling" emulator to work with it. 5. I learned how to optimize my python code after reading this very useful post on the matter and I'm going to take optimization into account for my future projects. 6. I read up on python magic methods which could be extremely useful for convenience and readability of your code. 7. I made an itch account which might come in handy in the future. 8. And finally I could write the base-code for a platforming game from scratch in these 2 days which will be used for my next platforming game attempts (after many many cleanups and optimizations of course)

TL;DR

1. Made a shmup game beforehand.
2. Learned Git.
3. Learned LGPL.
4. Learned PyInstaller.
5. Learned python optimization tricks.
6. Learned python magic functions.
7. Made an itch.io account.
8. Made the base-code for a platforming game.

Thanks to

• @PhilStrahl aka Pixel Prophecy for inspiring me enough to attempt this challenge.
• KidsCanCode YouTube Channel for the best pygame tutorials I've yet to come across.
• And of course @Pov and the community for making this all possible.

I will play other people's games a little later. Feel free to reply to this post with links to your game. I will play them if they have Linux support (or are WINE compatible) or are web-based.