Pyskool 1.3 has been released. As usual, copies are available from the download page, the Python Package Index, or GitHub.

Yes, despite numerous reports to the contrary (possibly), Pyskool is not dead. It just needed a decade off to go and find itself, or something like that. And now I’m glad to report that it’s back, and it has found itself to be seriously out of date. Which is where this new release comes in.

Most important of all, support for Python 2.7 (which reached End of Life on 1st January 2020) has been dropped: Python 3 (for which support was added in version 1.2) is now a minimum requirement. Gone also is support for Pygame 1.x, coinciding with the addition of explicit support for Pygame version 2 - which, it turns out, is not entirely backwards-compatible with version 1.

Those changes aside, this new release does continue the now well-established tradition of including no new features. There are several bug fixes, though. Most notably, the bug that could send a character to a negative x-coordinate (i.e. into the inescapable void beyond the left edge of the visible play area) has been squashed. Less notably, Einstein now responds to Mr Rockitt’s questions in Ezad Looks without missing out the word ‘is’.

Anyway, for full details on all the fixes and minor changes in this release, consult the changelog. After that, I encourage you to take this opportunity to download and play Pyskool while it’s in this rare, up-to-date and working state. And cheerio until 2036, when - if I still have my wits about me - I might be releasing version 1.4 to provide compatibility with Python 3.25 and Pygame 3.