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Gosu is a 2D game development library for the Ruby and C++ programming languages, available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. The C++ version is also available for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch; an Android port is being developed right now. The Ruby version works with MRI, MacRuby, and Rubinius, but not JRuby.
Gosu only provides basic building blocks:
- a window with a main loop and callbacks
- 2D graphics and text, accelerated by 3D hardware
- sound samples and music in various formats
- keyboard, mouse, and gamepad input
Specs
Pros
Cons
Con Deploying Ruby apps is a mess
Games built with the Ruby to .exe "compiler" do nothing more than extract your source code and Ruby.exe to %TEMP%, then run it. The code is not really compiled at all. The process for wrapping games as Mac apps is a bit nicer, but you'll need a paid Apple Developer subscription to code sign the app, or users will see a warning/error when running your game.
The only way to really compile Ruby is to use RubyMotion, which does not work on Windows and requires a paid subscription on top of the Apple Developer one.
(This Con is not specific to Gosu. Deploying Ruby code has never been fun.)