By Ning Yap [@ningbit]

Tetris, c.1986 in a Soviet lab

I don’t mean to pigeonhole myself and this blog into being all about game development and game design (as my first two posts would seem to indicate), but it is what my beginner mind is gravitating towards, mainly out of curiosity. Maybe because I don’t get to play games anymore and consider them a poor investment of my time these days. But programming games… That’s cerebral and smart! *ahem

So perousing speakerdeck.com for a class assignment alerted me to the fact that I’m not alone at all. See here and here. There are a good number of people interested in utilizing Ruby for game development. And where there is interest — I’m learning — there are always gems! The one I’ll be focusing on (and also using) is called ‘Gosu’.

gem install gosu

So there’s a good amount of documentation about gosu on their site http://www.libgosu.org/, much of which I’m sure I’ll understand better once I try to implement it. But I’ll summarize what gosu is here

• It’s a 2D game development library
• It’s C++ based, with a Ruby wrapper
• Finished game will run on OSX, Linux and Windows platforms
• OpenGL is used for rendering

So my last game I tried to write, see my last post, was played in the command line, didn’t refresh, and had no sprites or fancy graphics. With gosu, I’ll be able to take advantage of real-time input from the player in the form of any keystroke (I’m thinking of a cool typing game!). It will be able to draw the window and then re-draw (I’m thinking of car-crashes and collisions and block-exploding animations). The Resource Manager allows for images and sprites (time to pay direct homage to my 8-bit and 16-bit past). The Game State Manager allows for win, loss, death, pause conditions (very much like real-life).

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    require 'gosu'

    class GameWindow < Gosu::Window
      def initialize
        super 640, 480, false
        self.caption = "Gosu Tutorial Game"
      end

      def update
        # game logic goes here
      end

      def draw
        # render logic goes here
      end

      def button_down button_id
        # called when button is pressed
      end
    end

    window = GameWindow.new
    window.show

Not only that, there is even an option for adding sound, which is probably the icing on the cake, since I didn’t tell you this, but I actually studied music/sound production in college.

Mario Teaches Typing

Ruby Typing Game?

Anyway, I recall this game called “Mario Teaches Typing” from the early 90s — back when it was possible to not know how to type (Mavis Beacon, anyone?). That game turned out to be pretty garbage, because speed typing to make Mario jump is horribly unsatisfying. But maybe we should take another look? How about a game that teaches basic Ruby syntax. Can writing nested each loops be a fun game play mechanic? I’ll have an answer to that question in the next few weeks, hopefully.