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Building Games with DragonRuby – A free book on Ruby game dev

181 points by brettcodes 4y ago

martijn_himself 4y ago
This is fantastic. I would highly recommend DragonRuby if you like Ruby as a language and would like to dip your toes into 2D game development. The community is very welcoming too.
- brettcodes 4y ago
  +1 on the community being kind and welcoming. That to me is a major factor. I've learned so much from the community, and it extends beyond just making game dev. The community organizes jams, monthly game clubs, and supports one another.
brettcodes 4y ago
I wrote this free book on how to make games with Ruby using the DragonRuby Game Toolkit. As I've been learning the engine, I've felt really inspired by how quickly I can prototype my ideas and release them for all the major platforms. DragonRuby GTK is a really interesting use of mruby and SDL. To see Ruby be used for anything other than Rails is always exciting. I thought maybe this book would nudge others interested in Ruby game dev to take the plunge. Would love any feedback! Thanks.
- dcchuck 4y ago
  This looks great, I am excited to take it for a spin. I really enjoyed your "Why the Book is Free" section.
- vladcodes 4y ago
  Thank you for sharing the book, Brett! I definitely need to revisit the SDK which I had from its early versions, but unfortunately it was always lacking something. That was years ago tho.
- Aleksdev 4y ago
  Thank you! There is just something magical about programming ruby that other languages can’t replicate.
iraliaf 4y ago
Do you have any examples of DragonRuby being used in a multiplayer game like asteroids?
- iraliaf 4y ago
  network, not local multiplayer, expecting something similar to how Unity has Mirror for publishing openGL web games
jb3689 4y ago
My experience with DragonRuby was really poor. I was dismayed how restrictive it was (e.g. with libraries). Images were particularly painful and I was annoyed that the toolkit couldn't dynamically resize them for me (nor could I pull in ImageMagick). Perhaps it was trying to deal with sprite sheets and having to hardcode pixel offsets. Yes, it uses Ruby syntactically, but it doesn't feel like Ruby to me as far as ecosystem and productivity go. This was a few years ago - maybe this has changed. I probably wouldn't give it another go, but I'd love to see something built in DragonRuby hosted online to see what it can do. Godot, while not perfect, fit my expectations better. I found myself simply using the prebuilt abstractions I was already building by hand in DragonRuby. Things mostly work. When it came time to cross-compile for hosting on itch.io, I was really delighted by how easy it was to get my games in front of people. That quick feedback loop got me hooked for a while.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  What language did you finish your projects with Godot and what language did you have to use on itch.io?
- weaksauce 4y ago
  dragon ruby uses mruby which is a much more constrained ruby designed to be embedded into applications and does constrain your gem use some.
- pdc56 4y ago
  My dream would be mruby or full ruby in Godot. OMG that would be all my xmas's all at once
  - Mikeb85 4y ago
    > My dream would be mruby or full ruby in Godot. There's a C API for Godot and GDExtension. It should be easy and it has been done before (but not maintained). The problem is that it's just far slower than GDScript or C#.
    - KronisLV 4y ago
SimianLogic 4y ago
I released a game in rubymagic back in the day and have kicked the tires on DragonRuby a few times. I love the concept but hate the license. They give it away for free all the time for game jams, but I think the fact that it’s paid is too big of a barrier for wide adoption. I hope your book does well anyway! It’s a fun piece of tech and it would be a good teaching tool if the engine was free (I’ve been using pixi.js with my kids).
- sarchertech 4y ago
  There’s a free license specifically for parents teaching their kids.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  It is so cheap, though... and free if you are teaching your kids.
- brettcodes 4y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! I appreciate where you're coming from. My perspective on the license and price is that it's a small team of less than 5 people who work on DragonRuby Game Toolkit. To spend $32 for a lifetime basic license is totally worth it to me for everything that comes with it. The work that's gone into the cross-platform support, designing the API, gluing together mruby and SDL, and more without a doubt is an incredibly compelling offering. I want to see DRGTK sustain itself for the long-term, and I think the team getting paid for helps make that happen. I've thought about what it'd be like if the basic license was always free... The book is free, so it's a little awkward to then have a reader need to pay to use the software it's about. Sure, maybe more people would use it, but for an engine still in its early days (~3 years isn't that long compared to those that have been around for 10+ years), I think having a slight barrier to entry may benefit the project so it's not flooded by needing to support the flood of people that'd come from an always free version while it grows, stabilizes, and establishes itself.
nomilk 4y ago
Can you self-host these games, say on heroku or similar? If anyone has examples of games they've made with ruby/DragonRuby, please drop a link, keen to check them out!
- brettcodes 4y ago
  You can generate builds for desktop operating systems and the web with the basic license. With the web builds, you can host them anywhere on the web since they're static files. But a lot of the community uses Itch.io to share their games. I'm actively working on an interactive showcase of DragonRuby games here: https://dragonridersunite.itch.io/dragon-os https://dragonridersunite.itch.io/dragon-os Or you can browse games made with it here: https://itch.io/games/made-with-dragonruby-gtk https://itch.io/games/made-with-dragonruby-gtk
galmactima 4y ago
Ruby for game development? Is this a joke?
jbverschoor 4y ago
While I love Ruby, and love the concept of DragonRuby, it’s a really naive and simple engine. It’s basically a wrapper around SDL, which means you’ll have to create everything you want in a game engine. But it’s a really good start to understand graphics and game programming.. I’d recommend cocos (2D) if you wanna create a 2D game. It’s very high performance, full features and is supported on almost any platform. You can write in c++, or use JavaScript / lua.
- claudiug 4y ago
  how is naive and simple engine? people behind are SDL guy, and another person that did make successful games on apple. it has a lot of features that other engines, have. so what do I miss here? does cocos2d is so advanced and better than dragon ruby to build a 2d game?
- brettcodes 4y ago
  I can understand where you're coming from, but I disagree with the sentiment of it basically being just a wrapper around SDL and naive. DragonRuby Game Toolkit's API is simple, and that's a good thing! It provides the foundations needed for building any kind of 2D game without introducing dozens of classes, an inheritance tree, or complex data models. With just a few primitive data types and some methods, everything one needs it there. Combine that with the sample code and the community, and there's not a type of 2D game out there that you can't get going with in DRGTK within a couple of hours. DRGTK does make it easy to render sprites and text and handle input on top of SDL, which is valuable in and of itself. But it's not just direct bindings where you have to look at and understand how SDL works. I've never once had to look at the SDL docs to understand DragonRuby GTK's API. What the engine then gives you is: cross-platform builds with a single command, its simple API, ability to write games in a fantastic language, live reload of your game while developing without needing to recompile, the ability to use the toolchain of your liking, and more. I'm personally not interested in using C++ to make games, and I think if someone is, they probably wouldn't want to use DragonRuby GTK anyway. But choosing between JS, Lua, or Ruby, I'd choose Ruby every single time. It's a more enjoyable language to use. That to me is a big factor in why I like DRGTK—the toolchain. After spending 10+ years making 2D games as a hobby by experimenting with XNA/MonoGame, Unity, HaxeFlixel, Love2D (Lua), Phaser.js, Gosu (Ruby), C++, and AS3, I really think DragonRuby has a unique combination of offerings that has me so excited about it and wanting to see it succeed.
vishald 4y ago
Sweet!!. I was always interested in game dev, but I wonder if Unity will be much easier for someone like me who has so little time for this hobby
- brettcodes 4y ago
  I think it may be the opposite with regards to Unity and being time constrained, as there's a lot more to learn with Unity when making games rather than something like DragonRuby Game Toolkit. For a hobby that you have only a little bit of time to dedicate to, I think 2D games in an engine with a simple API would be quite a bit easier. But that's just me!
  - rookderby 4y ago
    I agree with Brett! Plus, if you're not already experienced with ruby, you'll get some exposure to the mruby variant in DR. It's been a pleasure working in ruby!
rookderby 4y ago
Brett, thanks for making this book! You've reinvigorated my interest in DragonRuby. I have a pro license that I haven't done much with; a couple jam "games". I have a question about FLOSS that I haven't seen the answer to floating around. If I want to make a GPLv3 game, release, and sell it, what are the implications with using DragonRuby? Is the recommended approach to ship the commercial packages with DragonRuby and have an open source variant running with zif[0]? Any recommendations? Thank you again for the book! [0] https://github.com/danhealy/dragonruby-zif https://github.com/danhealy/dragonruby-zif
- brettcodes 4y ago
  I can definitely help you here! The code you write is yours to license as you please. So you can release the source for your game under GPLv3, you just can't distribute the engine alongside the source. Someone would have to own the engine and use your source alongside it to contribute to your game. You can compile and sell your game as you normally would, of course! Here's an example of one of my games that is released under the Unlicense: https://github.com/brettchalupa/XENO.TEST https://github.com/brettchalupa/XENO.TEST & https://book.dragonriders.community/source-control.html#a-note-on-open-source-dragonruby-game-toolkit-games https://book.dragonriders.community/source-control.html#a-no... walks through how to do that Zif is an open source community library for DragonRuby Game Toolkit that gives you a lot more classes and structure, if you so choose to use it. So it's not an "instead of" but rather a library you can drop into your DragonRuby Game Toolkit game. While DragonRuby GTK is not FLOSS, your code is your code, and it's built upon mruby, llvm, and SDL, so it's got a really strong FLOSS core. I'm not a license expert tho, so maybe there are more implications than I'm realizing.
  - rookderby 4y ago
    Thanks, Brett! Really appreciate the reply. I think tracking the 'mygame' directory is the way to go, and I'll also investigate packaging with Zif.
acmecorps 4y ago
I love Ruby, but I always wonder if performance will be an issue if there're many things happening on screen especially on mobile. Does anyone has any experience?

181 points by brettcodes 4y ago

This is fantastic. I would highly recommend DragonRuby if you like Ruby as a language and would like to dip your toes into 2D game development. The community is very welcoming too.

brettcodes 4y ago
+1 on the community being kind and welcoming. That to me is a major factor. I've learned so much from the community, and it extends beyond just making game dev. The community organizes jams, monthly game clubs, and supports one another.

brettcodes 4y ago

I wrote this free book on how to make games with Ruby using the DragonRuby Game Toolkit. As I've been learning the engine, I've felt really inspired by how quickly I can prototype my ideas and release them for all the major platforms. DragonRuby GTK is a really interesting use of mruby and SDL. To see Ruby be used for anything other than Rails is always exciting. I thought maybe this book would nudge others interested in Ruby game dev to take the plunge. Would love any feedback! Thanks.

dcchuck 4y ago
This looks great, I am excited to take it for a spin. I really enjoyed your "Why the Book is Free" section.
vladcodes 4y ago
Thank you for sharing the book, Brett! I definitely need to revisit the SDK which I had from its early versions, but unfortunately it was always lacking something. That was years ago tho.
Aleksdev 4y ago
Thank you! There is just something magical about programming ruby that other languages can’t replicate.

iraliaf 4y ago

Do you have any examples of DragonRuby being used in a multiplayer game like asteroids?

iraliaf 4y ago
network, not local multiplayer, expecting something similar to how Unity has Mirror for publishing openGL web games

jb3689 4y ago

My experience with DragonRuby was really poor. I was dismayed how restrictive it was (e.g. with libraries). Images were particularly painful and I was annoyed that the toolkit couldn't dynamically resize them for me (nor could I pull in ImageMagick). Perhaps it was trying to deal with sprite sheets and having to hardcode pixel offsets. Yes, it uses Ruby syntactically, but it doesn't feel like Ruby to me as far as ecosystem and productivity go. This was a few years ago - maybe this has changed. I probably wouldn't give it another go, but I'd love to see something built in DragonRuby hosted online to see what it can do. Godot, while not perfect, fit my expectations better. I found myself simply using the prebuilt abstractions I was already building by hand in DragonRuby. Things mostly work. When it came time to cross-compile for hosting on itch.io, I was really delighted by how easy it was to get my games in front of people. That quick feedback loop got me hooked for a while.

stevenwoo 4y ago
What language did you finish your projects with Godot and what language did you have to use on itch.io?
weaksauce 4y ago
dragon ruby uses mruby which is a much more constrained ruby designed to be embedded into applications and does constrain your gem use some.
pdc56 4y ago
My dream would be mruby or full ruby in Godot. OMG that would be all my xmas's all at once
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  > My dream would be mruby or full ruby in Godot. There's a C API for Godot and GDExtension. It should be easy and it has been done before (but not maintained). The problem is that it's just far slower than GDScript or C#.
  - KronisLV 4y ago

SimianLogic 4y ago

I released a game in rubymagic back in the day and have kicked the tires on DragonRuby a few times. I love the concept but hate the license. They give it away for free all the time for game jams, but I think the fact that it’s paid is too big of a barrier for wide adoption. I hope your book does well anyway! It’s a fun piece of tech and it would be a good teaching tool if the engine was free (I’ve been using pixi.js with my kids).

sarchertech 4y ago
There’s a free license specifically for parents teaching their kids.
cortesoft 4y ago
It is so cheap, though... and free if you are teaching your kids.
brettcodes 4y ago
Thanks for the kind words! I appreciate where you're coming from. My perspective on the license and price is that it's a small team of less than 5 people who work on DragonRuby Game Toolkit. To spend $32 for a lifetime basic license is totally worth it to me for everything that comes with it. The work that's gone into the cross-platform support, designing the API, gluing together mruby and SDL, and more without a doubt is an incredibly compelling offering. I want to see DRGTK sustain itself for the long-term, and I think the team getting paid for helps make that happen. I've thought about what it'd be like if the basic license was always free... The book is free, so it's a little awkward to then have a reader need to pay to use the software it's about. Sure, maybe more people would use it, but for an engine still in its early days (~3 years isn't that long compared to those that have been around for 10+ years), I think having a slight barrier to entry may benefit the project so it's not flooded by needing to support the flood of people that'd come from an always free version while it grows, stabilizes, and establishes itself.

nomilk 4y ago

Can you self-host these games, say on heroku or similar? If anyone has examples of games they've made with ruby/DragonRuby, please drop a link, keen to check them out!

brettcodes 4y ago
You can generate builds for desktop operating systems and the web with the basic license. With the web builds, you can host them anywhere on the web since they're static files. But a lot of the community uses Itch.io to share their games. I'm actively working on an interactive showcase of DragonRuby games here: https://dragonridersunite.itch.io/dragon-os https://dragonridersunite.itch.io/dragon-os Or you can browse games made with it here: https://itch.io/games/made-with-dragonruby-gtk https://itch.io/games/made-with-dragonruby-gtk

galmactima 4y ago

Ruby for game development? Is this a joke?

jbverschoor 4y ago

While I love Ruby, and love the concept of DragonRuby, it’s a really naive and simple engine. It’s basically a wrapper around SDL, which means you’ll have to create everything you want in a game engine. But it’s a really good start to understand graphics and game programming.. I’d recommend cocos (2D) if you wanna create a 2D game. It’s very high performance, full features and is supported on almost any platform. You can write in c++, or use JavaScript / lua.

claudiug 4y ago
how is naive and simple engine? people behind are SDL guy, and another person that did make successful games on apple. it has a lot of features that other engines, have. so what do I miss here? does cocos2d is so advanced and better than dragon ruby to build a 2d game?
brettcodes 4y ago
I can understand where you're coming from, but I disagree with the sentiment of it basically being just a wrapper around SDL and naive. DragonRuby Game Toolkit's API is simple, and that's a good thing! It provides the foundations needed for building any kind of 2D game without introducing dozens of classes, an inheritance tree, or complex data models. With just a few primitive data types and some methods, everything one needs it there. Combine that with the sample code and the community, and there's not a type of 2D game out there that you can't get going with in DRGTK within a couple of hours. DRGTK does make it easy to render sprites and text and handle input on top of SDL, which is valuable in and of itself. But it's not just direct bindings where you have to look at and understand how SDL works. I've never once had to look at the SDL docs to understand DragonRuby GTK's API. What the engine then gives you is: cross-platform builds with a single command, its simple API, ability to write games in a fantastic language, live reload of your game while developing without needing to recompile, the ability to use the toolchain of your liking, and more. I'm personally not interested in using C++ to make games, and I think if someone is, they probably wouldn't want to use DragonRuby GTK anyway. But choosing between JS, Lua, or Ruby, I'd choose Ruby every single time. It's a more enjoyable language to use. That to me is a big factor in why I like DRGTK—the toolchain. After spending 10+ years making 2D games as a hobby by experimenting with XNA/MonoGame, Unity, HaxeFlixel, Love2D (Lua), Phaser.js, Gosu (Ruby), C++, and AS3, I really think DragonRuby has a unique combination of offerings that has me so excited about it and wanting to see it succeed.

vishald 4y ago

Sweet!!. I was always interested in game dev, but I wonder if Unity will be much easier for someone like me who has so little time for this hobby

brettcodes 4y ago
I think it may be the opposite with regards to Unity and being time constrained, as there's a lot more to learn with Unity when making games rather than something like DragonRuby Game Toolkit. For a hobby that you have only a little bit of time to dedicate to, I think 2D games in an engine with a simple API would be quite a bit easier. But that's just me!
- rookderby 4y ago
  I agree with Brett! Plus, if you're not already experienced with ruby, you'll get some exposure to the mruby variant in DR. It's been a pleasure working in ruby!

rookderby 4y ago

Brett, thanks for making this book! You've reinvigorated my interest in DragonRuby. I have a pro license that I haven't done much with; a couple jam "games". I have a question about FLOSS that I haven't seen the answer to floating around. If I want to make a GPLv3 game, release, and sell it, what are the implications with using DragonRuby? Is the recommended approach to ship the commercial packages with DragonRuby and have an open source variant running with zif[0]? Any recommendations? Thank you again for the book! [0] https://github.com/danhealy/dragonruby-zif https://github.com/danhealy/dragonruby-zif

brettcodes 4y ago
I can definitely help you here! The code you write is yours to license as you please. So you can release the source for your game under GPLv3, you just can't distribute the engine alongside the source. Someone would have to own the engine and use your source alongside it to contribute to your game. You can compile and sell your game as you normally would, of course! Here's an example of one of my games that is released under the Unlicense: https://github.com/brettchalupa/XENO.TEST https://github.com/brettchalupa/XENO.TEST & https://book.dragonriders.community/source-control.html#a-note-on-open-source-dragonruby-game-toolkit-games https://book.dragonriders.community/source-control.html#a-no... walks through how to do that Zif is an open source community library for DragonRuby Game Toolkit that gives you a lot more classes and structure, if you so choose to use it. So it's not an "instead of" but rather a library you can drop into your DragonRuby Game Toolkit game. While DragonRuby GTK is not FLOSS, your code is your code, and it's built upon mruby, llvm, and SDL, so it's got a really strong FLOSS core. I'm not a license expert tho, so maybe there are more implications than I'm realizing.
- rookderby 4y ago
  Thanks, Brett! Really appreciate the reply. I think tracking the 'mygame' directory is the way to go, and I'll also investigate packaging with Zif.

acmecorps 4y ago

I love Ruby, but I always wonder if performance will be an issue if there're many things happening on screen especially on mobile. Does anyone has any experience?