From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-07-16T04:12:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Writing games in Ruby?

Innocence wrote:

> Hey

Moin!

> I'd been messing around with Python for a few weeks when I came upon
> Ruby. Personally I much prefer the Ruby syntax (especially the OO
> consistency and not not using indents to define blocks). Unfortunately
> however, it seems that the Ruby community lacks a stable, easy-to-use
> game-module like PyGame - at least I haven't been able to find one (ok
> so I found RUDL, but it hasn't been updated for years and it seems to
> be buggy).

I've used Ruby/SDL -- it works fairly well, but it has some SDL-specific 
problems.

A good friend of mine is working on creating Ruby bindings for his C++ 
game framework (called Ruby/Gosu) and another friend of both of us is 
currently making sure that portability won't be an issue.

I myself have written a game (a cross between Dr. Mario and Sokoban 
actually) in Ruby for a Ludum Dare contest (Develop a game matching a 
pre-selected topic all on your own in 48 hours) a few months ago. Speed 
wasn't a problem -- in fact SDL was the bottleneck. Ruby/SDL was a bit 
too low-level for my taste; I would have been able to make good use of 
more framework -- a menu system and something that takes the burden of 
managing game objects from me. (And I'm going to make sure that such 
tasks will be handled by Ruby/Gosu or a framework around it.)

Some links to my Ruby/SDL game in case anybody is interested. (Sorry for 
the partly bad code, but 48 hours can be very short when you also have 
to develop game art and content. (And if you're not all that good on 
those.)):

- Screenshot: http://www.ludumdare.com/user/1011/Infectoban.png
- Complete windows package: (This includes the game itself and some SDL
   DLLs that it needs. You're not all that likely to have that DLLs so
   you probably best pick this one.)
   http://noegnud.sourceforge.net/flgr/Infectoban-dll.zip
- Windows package without DLLs:
   http://noegnud.sourceforge.net/flgr/Infectoban.zip
- Source code: (This is the portable version of the game, it should work
   everywhere, but you will need to have Ruby/SDL available on your
   system. On http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-sdl/ you can get
   Ruby/SDL)
   http://noegnud.sourceforge.net/flgr/Infectoban-source.zip

Regards,
Florian Gross