I'm a Dragon Rider, if you will. I have bought the pro license and have used the toolkit to make some demos/experiments. I'm excited by how quickly I can produce a game that works on multiple targets. It's been great as a recreational coder. I have aspirations of figuring out the right game loop and eventually selling it. It's a lot of fun and fits my desired approach. Thanks to everyone working on it!
If I understand correctly (from a quick browse of the docs) this is Ruby _without_ anything remotely like Rails. That makes it interesting.<p>I did a Rails job once. I kept thinking that I liked the language as a kind of modern OO language in the spirit of Python (and also Lua a bit) but I really disliked the ecosystem around Rails. For instance, the project I worked on had to maintain two separate versions of Ruby because different gems worked with different Ruby versions (it's been a while so I don't remember details).<p>Another thing that bothered me is that everytime I searched online for help to do something slightly more advanced in Ruby my search results were inundated with "hello world" style posts from aspiring Rails devs eager to advertise their passionf or Rails. I could never find the information I wanted, so I had to do everything the hard way.<p>Overall I had a horrible experience with Rails though I'm sure it's far from that bad for most. Anyway it's refreshing to see a cool use of Ruby without the Rails.
I don't see this mentioned on the website, but, if I remember correctly, they also have materials for teaching kids how to code. I was thinking about running something at my son's school last year before Covid shut everything down.<p>The "hotloading" is really nice and the community on Discord is excellent.
At the risk of hijacking the thread, are you still doing any work on RubyMotion? I always thought RubyMotion was interesting because of how it provided seamless access to the host platform APIs and was even built atop the host platforms' object models. I might have even used it for a product about 5 years ago, if it had supported Windows as a target platform (though I'm not sure how that would have worked).
Lots of typical anti-ruby grumbling in this so I'll just say; this looks awesome and I'm excited to give it a try. I still love programming in Ruby, and there's no reason at all why a game written in Ruby couldn't be performant. Great to see a good use of mRuby too. I've had ideas for games in the past but I know that having to learn an entirely new language, framework, and concept of development will mean that I never finish it. Having an option in my favourite language removes one of those barriers to entry.
I was in search of a bare bones engine like Love that could deploy to many platforms. I didn't need a full-blown game dev environment, and I was leaning towards a coding heavy interface - no blueprints, drag-and-drop gui, etc. I found Defold, and I have been using it for about three months. I wonder how DragonRuby compares other than the Lua or Ruby choice as the scripting language. Defold does have more of an IDE/GUI to it, but you can stick to just coding. I program in many languages, so learning Ruby is not a big deal. I actually tried Ruby back in 2001. I liked the syntax. I'll have to try DragonRuby out, but I am afraid I'll wind up buying the Pro version to develop on Android. I don't like the yearly subscription model. I prefer buying a permanent license, and upgrade as I need it. The fact that DragonRuby costs money and is a subscription may just keep me on Defold. I will not know until I try it. I may surprise myself by falling in love with Ruby!
Decided to do a flash sale given all the visibility the engine has gotten recently. You can get the Standard License free for the next 24 hours: <a href="https://itch.io/s/48411/dragonruby-game-toolkit-hacker-news-celebration" rel="nofollow">https://itch.io/s/48411/dragonruby-game-toolkit-hacker-news-...</a>
Lets say I am not a Ruby dev, what would compel me to learn this over Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this?<p>I remember Ruby Motion was a thing, then it wasn't... then it was again? I started learning web dev with RoR and quickly moved to Python as the ecosystem was so much bigger. I could transfer my Python knowledge into so many different domains. I remember at the time, I really wanted a "Ruby Motion" for Python... still do actually.<p>I have come full circle and now think JS is eating the world and I am playing in that garden... we'll see where that ends up I suppose. In any case, GOOD LUCK... I hope for the best!
Looks interesting and the developer demo was succinct. Feedback is to include some links or video to some demo or even rough playable games.<p>Would be neat to have something to quickly go wow over.
Very impressive!!!<p>One question. Is DragonRuby, in essence, a mRuby compiler? Or is it an implementation of an mRuby interpretor that calls on a low-level API for fast game functionality?
Why would I choose this over a FOSS 2D game engine like Godot that offers almost everything this engine offers without the price tag? Not trying to shit on the project, I just don't see a compelling argument put forth on the website as to why I should pay $50 or $98 a year for an engine that I can only see has been used to port one open source game to Switch and a bunch of tech demos. What's the hook? Why should this be my game engine of choice?
This looks like a fantastic dev experience and it's great to see this team building something like this. Indie game dev is near and dear to my heart.<p>Unfortunately, HN tends to be full of haters. On the behalf of the rest of us, thanks for sharing DragonRuby!
> This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it).<p>> DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon.<p>This feels like a liability for the long term. The community is now depending on Ryan to maintain this custom Ruby implementation, if I'm reading correctly.
I jumped into DragonRuby myself and considering my current work involves Rails it was extremely easy to dive into DR and code in two game jams solo. Love it at minimum as a hobbyist tool and I see the potential for shipping to all platforms with the Pro license.<p>Thank you!
20 years ago, I shipped a Ruby/SDL powered quiz game to a network of Windows NT4-powered games cabinets in pubs. They had 64MB RAM and the jerky animation due to garbage collection pauses ATE ME ALIVE for about 6 months.<p>What's changed in Ruby since then to make smooth animation possible?