Summary

In this chapter, we made a small Kivy game from simple building blocks such as canvas instructions and widgets.

As a UI toolkit, Kivy gets many things right and its remarkable flexibility allows you to build pretty much anything, be it another boring Twitter client or a video game. One aspect that deserves special mention is Kivy's implementation of properties—these are immensely helpful to organize data flow across the board and help us to effectively eliminate useless updates (such as redraws in the absence of changed properties).

Another thing about Kivy that may be surprising and counterintuitive at first is its relatively high performance—especially since Python isn't exactly famous for being extremely quick. This is partly because low-level subsystems in Kivy are written in Cython and compiled to a blazing fast machine code, with performance levels about the same as, for example, the C language. Also, the use of hardware-accelerated graphics all but guarantees smooth animations...