Here’s the Deal

Gosu vs GLBasic

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When comparing Gosu vs GLBasic, the Slant community recommends Gosu for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Gosu is ranked 50th while GLBasic is ranked 76th. The most important reason people chose Gosu is:

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.

Specs

No specs yet!

Console targetsXbox

Desktop targetsWindows; Linux

LanguagesBasic

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best 2D game engines?

Gosu

GLBasic

Pros

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

Pro
Easy to develop with

Language is easy to use, with a fast compiler.

Pro
Fast 2D

Pro
Easy to learn

Pro
Support

Forum support is great. No advertising in program or forums. Company has been going for over 10 years.

Pro
3D

Unlike most multi-platform development systems, 3D is available across most of them.

Pro
Multi-platform

Code can be written once and will work on supported platforms with very little modification.

Pro
No hidden fees

PC version is free.

Full Multi-platform version requires one-off very reasonable price, and all further updates are free, however you can run a watermarked demo on your chosen platform with the free demo version.

Pro
C/C++ support

C/C++ code can be included inline or as a DLL/.o/dylib file.

Pro
HTML 5 compiling is now faster and works better

Pro
Default GUI system works fine, and has all the needed widgets needed

Only problem is position is based on position of previous widget.

Pro
Compiler is fast and produces efficient code

Pro
Free for home development

Create apps for non commercial 2D programs running on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. The extension to create programs for other platforms, 3D or network applications requires a license key. Otherwise the "Premium" programs are limited to 10 min runtime for test purposes. There is no trial limit for the development environment.

Pro
Networking

Easy-to-use networking system with either TCP or UDP.

Pro
Books

Programmers reference guide, user guide and various others are free.

Pro
Gaming related functions

Viewports, sprites, rotating/animating and zooming sprites, collision detection and pathfinding.

Ad
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.)

Con
Command set has hardly changed or been updated/improved over the years

Con
Poor 2d collision detection with rotated sprites

2d sprite rotation with collision detection isn't present and requires some annoying run-arounds to achieve what is a staple of other game engines.

Con
No multi-platform editor

Whilst Linux and Mac IDE's were started, they were never completed.

Con
No clear way to monetize apps

It's impossible to place ads. There is a third party in-app purchase library hidden somewhere deep within the forums which hasn't been updated for years.