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Add to SafariWhen comparing Duality vs Gosu, the Slant community recommends Duality for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Duality is ranked 30th while Gosu is ranked 50th. The most important reason people chose Duality is:
The full source code is available on GitHub, where the framework is actively developed. All of the editor, core and plugin code is written in C#.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
The full source code is available on GitHub, where the framework is actively developed. All of the editor, core and plugin code is written in C#.
Pro Great editor
Duality includes a powerful visual editing system that can be used for previewing, integrating, editing and testing game content.
Pro Live reload of code and assets
Pro Very extensible
Because both Core and Editor are completely plugin-based, Duality not only incorporates a clean and modular design, but is also very extensible - even if it wasn't Open Source. In fact, most of the standard editing capabilities comes in form of Editor plugins.
Pro Built-in physics and lighting
Pro Friendly to version control systems
It can be configured to serialize all data in a text-based format, which has been structurally optimized for version control systems.
Pro Used in commercial projects
It has been used in a production environment without burning the place to the ground. Supposedly artist-proof editor workflow with an API for tailoring the system to fit your team.
Pro Lightweight
Gosu is not a game development framework, only a media library that happens to be suited to game development. (Kind of like SDL in the C world.) That means the interface is relatively small.
Pro Mature API, actively maintained and developed
Gosu has been under development since 2001. It is mature and has several toolkits built on top of it to provide additional functionality.
Pro Cross-platform, even mobile, using Ruby
Cons
Con Visual Studio required
To have possibility for scripting you have to download entire Visual Studio and spend 10 GB of free space
Con Requires windows for development
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.)
