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Add to SafariGosu vs LITIENGINE
When comparing Gosu vs LITIENGINE, the Slant community recommends Gosu for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Gosu is ranked 50th while LITIENGINE is ranked 87th. 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
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 Easy to use
Clean and well-designed API that is easily discoverable. Comes with a simple tool (utiLITI) for editing levels based on .tmx maps.
Pro Free an open-source
The engine is published under the MIT license and is entirely free to use.
Pro they are developing a beta for mac and linux
Pro Active and helpful community
Has an active forum and discord channel to discuss topics about the engine.
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 Limited to Desktop
Games made with the engine only run on Windows, Linux and MacOS. There is no support for Android or HTML, yet.
