Is there anything I need aware of using Tkinter and pygame together?

Both Tkinter and Pygame have their own event loops, so doing what you want is far from simple. The problem is that Pygame wants to control both the screen and the events the user feeds into the computer. This doesn't work well with GUI libraries, which also want to be "in control".

I would suggest sticking with Pygame, it has some nice GUI toolkits that will help you create buttons and other controls. Go over this page - it should clear things out. You may also find this discussion useful.

Apart from the practical aspects, a GUI created with Pygame is also IMHO more suitable for a game than something done with Tkinter, since games usually have original, thematical user interfaces and not the bland "text box + button" windows we're used to in other applications.

Take a look at some of the sample games on the Pygame wiki, many have GUIs and you can borrow ideas and code from them.

    from tkinter import *    import pygame    import random    import os    global playing    playing=False    def playpause():        global playing        if playing==True:            playing=False        else:            playing=True    root = Tk()    embed = Frame(root, width=640, height=480)    embed.grid(row=0,column=2)    playpausebutton=Button(root, command=playpause, text="Play/Pause")    playpausebutton.grid(row=1,column=2)    root.update()    os.environ['SDL_WINDOWID'] = str(embed.winfo_id())    os.environ['SDL_VIDEODRIVER'] = 'windib'    pygame.display.init()    screen = pygame.display.set_mode((640,480))    pygame.display.flip()    while True:        #your code here        if playing:                 screen.fill((random.randint(0,255),random.randint(0,255),random.randint(0,255)))        pygame.display.flip()        root.update()

This works just great, I have used this method successfully in multiple cases.

I have also found pgu is awful. However, what you say about the tkinter event loop taking control is wrong. You just call root.update instead of mainloop, and this can go inside of a while loop to replace the mainloop. Answering your main question however, there is something you should be aware of. It seems that whenever I run the two programs alongside each other, this traceback occurs:

TclError: expected boolean value but got "-1"

Fatal Python error: (pygame parachute) Segmentation Fault

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.Please contact the application's support team for more information.

Because of this I would avoid the combination, although I suspect this particular issue may pertain to my use of threads.