When comparing Gosu vs Yae, the Slant community recommends Gosu for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Gosu is ranked 50th while Yae is ranked 106th. 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.
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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 IDE
Ships with easy to use IDE created only for development in it
Pro Frequent updates
Updated weekly
Pro Cross-platform
Supports all major platforms
- Windows
- Mac
- Linux
- Android
- iOS
Pro Multiple languages support
Supports writing games in both Lua and JavaScript and for advanced users it´s plugin system also supports Java.
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 Lone developer
Con In early development
Do not have as much features as other listed engines.