I'm currently using pygame for my first major programming project (a bullet hell shooter), and it works pretty well. I recommend reading through the whole documentation and watching a tutorial series on it. I didn't bother doing that, and I ended up having to scrap my project and start over since I wasn't using some of pygame's features properly.

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rabbyt. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but it's at least a step up from raw pygame. 2d on a 3d canvas, so it's hardware accelerated. More on reddit.com

dunno if you've used pygame, but if so, have any thoughts of comparison? I've only ever tried pygame, but heard pyglet was more modern feeling but with more stunted development. More on reddit.com

To learn Python, I recommend Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way . After working through that, you should have a fairly good grasp of the language. Then, look into PyGame , it should help you a lot with your goal. It offers a not too complex API for doing things like drawing to the screen, handling user input or dealing with sound, i.e. stuff that you will absolutely have to deal with if you're planning to write any kind of graphical game. Katie Cunningham had a nice series of blog posts about writing a 2D rogue-like with PyGame last year. It's not really a tutorial, but records her experiences with the library and coming up with the architecture, you can learn loads from that, especially if you're a beginner. You should be able to adopt a lot of it for your RPG. After that, you can take a look at the code of some of the many RPGs created with PyGame to get even more inspiration for your architecture and code. Concerning the different "versions" of Python, the commonly used versions are Python 2.x and Python 3.x. I generally recommend using Python 3, but some libraries still only support Python 2, so you will have to decide on a case-to-case basis what to use. However, the Zed Shaw book still uses Python 2, so you might want to start out with that :-) The differences between the two are not that huge, you should be able to adjust within a day or so after reading the changes. Concerning the other "versions" you listed, CPython is the default implementation of Python (written in C), i.e. the Virtual Machine that runs your code. There are some others like Jython (Java), IronPython (C#) or PyPy (Python... don't ask ;-) ). You will generally use CPython, as that is the most widely used implementation. Cython on the other hand, is a library that helps you to write external modules for Python with C. More on reddit.com