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Add to SafariWhen comparing Gosu vs Ren'Py, the Slant community recommends Ren'Py for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Ren'Py is ranked 39th while Gosu is ranked 50th. The most important reason people chose Ren'Py is:
Available on Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS and Android.
Specs
Question Ranking
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 Cross-platform
Available on Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS and Android.
Pro Active and friendly community
Pro Reasonably good at creating puzzle and point-and-click games
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 Not for every genre
While technically capable of creating 2D games in any genre, Ren'Py excels in creating visual novels and has a reasonable feature set for creating puzzle and point-and-click games. Other genres are best tackled by other engines.
Con Outdated Documentation and official built-in tutorials
Unfortunately, you will have to hunt relevant info on how Ren'py script works. The Ren'Py dev has the working tutorials on his Patreon, other than that you might as well just code in Python.
Con Requires knowledge of Python to use
