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Add to SafariWhen comparing Crafty.js vs Gosu, the Slant community recommends Crafty.js for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Crafty.js is ranked 37th while Gosu is ranked 50th.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Javascript
Pro Eventbinding
Easy to learn, based on Entities and Components, the later being class-like objects that entities inherit.
Pro Modular
Has open function binding systems, allowing easy creation of custom components.
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 No IDE
If you like having some huge GUI akin to Gamemaker, Unreal, Unity, etc, Crafty is not for you.
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.)
