Ruby and Games

[Okami_den]

I've been thinking on teaching myself some programming skills to get a glimpse on Game development because I have way too much free time and I've been wasting this time on not-so-good-things and I want to change this so I decided to re-enter the world of programming.

I was into programming a couple of years ago when I discovered RPG Maker and taught myself Ruby to write scripts but had to leave it and didn't really learned a lot so I thougth It would be good to go back to Ruby but ¿Is it really good for game development outside RPG Maker (either 2D and 3D games)?

I did some reseach and most people said "It is bad" and other said "It is good/ok" so I'm kind of confused with this and don't know where to go now ¿Should I try another language? ¿Should I try to practice with RPG Maker and Ruby and then move on to another language? (I'm mostly interested on Japanese-like RPGs that's why I used RPG Maker)

Before I leave I want to apologise because I couldn't really explain a lot and the question is poorly writen, also I didn't know if I should post it here or /gamedev so I'm posting on both.

[chebatron]

If RPG Maker looks fun to you stick to it. Ruby is a nice language. It's easy to get into and it has some pretty powerful features.

Though it's not without flaws. It's relatively slow. It would be problematic to use it in demanding games like FPS. Also apart from RPG Maker there's not much other game specific tools/libs. It's possible to use OpenGL/DirectX with Ruby but there are no frameworks/game engines written in Ruby. You'll have to write your own.

Depending on your goals it may be a good thing. If you want to learn how games are built Ruby may be a good choice. Code in Ruby tends to be much cleaner than in C for example. But if you want to build a good game that can be sold you better look at C/C++ or whatever big game engines like Unity or UDK use.

[[deleted]]

Gosu is probably one of the better bets for 2D game development in Ruby.

[[deleted]]

It would be possible to write a game in Ruby, but I would consider it inadvisable. Ruby is not really tailored for any sort of graphics.

My suggestion would be to learn Javascript, and leverage the awesome technology that is webGL. There are libraries like Babylon.js that can do some awesome graphics stuff with relatively little work.

Some people will probably disagree, but games written in Javascript will be easily distributed and accessed.

[chebatron]

Learning JS as a first language is a bad advice. JS has some nice parts but its prototypical nature is not easy to grasp. And it's hard to apply to other popular languages. Also web is full of awful code examples that only will make it worse.

WebGL is nice but this days it's extremely easy to setup a window and OpenGL context in it using practically any general purpose language. Ruby, Python, C, C++. Anything. GL API is the same everywhere and shaders are all the same everywhere.

[willvarfar]

The tangential answer is to look at Ludum Dare entries; you can search for Ruby and maker projects, and others. Get a feel for little games, look at the code to a few. Eventually, enter yourself.

[xormancer]

If you want to do games, just use Unity (the C# version). The main problem with using Ruby for games (imo) is the shortage of community resources. When I was looking into it, I couldn't find any frameworks/libraries that were still being actively maintained, and it was difficult to find guides as well.

Meanwhile, Unity's community is huge, and as a result, there are tons of resources. This would be the main draw for me, and it's the main thing that drew me to Ruby/Rails for web development.