You can write a full scale anything in any language. PyGame and SDL are more than up to the task.

If you are having performance issues, run your game through a profiler and see where the problem areas are.

I've done that, everything runs really smoothly other than drawing each individual 'tile' to the screen. I have a giant world, but the program only draws the tiles it needs to on the screen depending on where the 'camera' is. So its never drawing tiles that are off the screen. The screen size is 800x640 with 32x32 tiles. So every frame it is drawing 500 tiles to the screen. I'm not exactly sure how to get around this... It's a tile-based RPG. How can I make it run faster then?

You can write a full scale anything in any language. PyGame and SDL are more than up to the task.

If you are having performance issues, run your game through a profiler and see where the problem areas are.

I've done that, everything runs really smoothly other than drawing each individual 'tile' to the screen. I have a giant world, but the program only draws the tiles it needs to on the screen depending on where the 'camera' is. So its never drawing tiles that are off the screen. The screen size is 800x640 with 32x32 tiles. So every frame it is drawing 500 (25x20) tiles to the screen. I'm not exactly sure how to get around this... It's a tile-based RPG. How can I make it run faster then?