John Elder works through PyGame one Thursday at a time, and the series is built the way somebody actually learns a game library: draw a shape, move it with the mouse, put an image on screen, then a sound, then a collision.
The middle of the course builds "Feed Aspen" from nothing into a working shooter, which is where sprites, classes, pausing and score text stop being separate ideas. The last stretch is a platformer — gravity, jumping, 2D vector movement, wrap-around and sprite animation.
Every lesson is short and every one ends with something running.