DragonRuby Game Toolkit is a professional grade 2D game engine. It's tiny (~3.5MB), fast, and cross-platform (including consoles and mobile). Ryan C. Gordon (Wikipedia) put together a 5-minute intro to DragonRuby Game Toolkit which shows the engine's hotload and deployment capabilities:
We've created a custom multi-level runtime specifically tuned for building games. There are no outside installers or OS level prerequisites. Everything is self-contained. Even a Raspberry Pi can be used to build games.
We handle the compilation, packaging, and execution of your code, letting you concentrate on what matters.
We understand the challenges that indie devs face (the creators of the engine are indie game devs themselves). We want you to succeed and ship your game. Our Discord Channel is very active and there is always someone around to help.
We don't vendor-lock you into an IDE (and by extension we don't collect usage data about you). You can use whatever editor you like. All commands to build are accessible via a simple Command Line Interface.
Optimized for size and speed. This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it).
DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon. He is one of the core maintainers of libSDL and has worked on many critically acclaimed games (Psychonauts, Braid, Quake, and Unreal Tournament to name a few).
It's been battled tested by indie game creator Amir Rajan who's already released games with it to the Nintendo Switch. It powers real world games that have amassed millions of downloads (The New Yorker).
Oh, and it's tiny. Like really tiny. The entire toolkit is ~3.5 megabytes.
Turn key builds for Windows, MacOS, and Linux with seamless publishing to Itch.io.
DragonRuby targets every platform: PC, Mac, Linux, Web Assembly, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, XBOX One, and PS4 (console compilation requires a business entity, NDA verification, contact Amir at [email protected] for more info).
# Define a tick method in main.rb which will be executed at 60hz.
def tick args
# Render a label at the top left showing the current tick count.
args.outputs.labels << { x: 10, y: 10.from_top, text: "#{args.state.tick_count}." }
# Render a sprite at the bottom left
args.outputs.sprites << { x: 10, y: 10, w: 100, h: 100, path: 'player.png' }
# If the mouse is clicked, play a sound.
args.outputs.sounds << 'fx.wav' if args.inputs.mouse.click
end
You can play around with the engine using our Online Sandbox. The source code for the sandbox is available on GitHub if you want to run a local instance of the website.
Be sure to checkout The Showcase Page to see all that's possible with the engine.
If you want to take a deep dive into the sample apps and api, full docs to the engine can be found here.
You are eligible for a free license if any of the following items pertain to you:
There are many opportunities to get a free lifetime Indie subscription, but the requirements are a bit stricter. First and foremost, you have to join the DragonRuby Discord Channel and be an active member in the community. From there you'll want to pursue the following goals (talk with @amirrajan on Discord to set up a game plan if you're serious):