Hi there. First I have to say that Gosu is amazing and easily the best thing I've ever used for making games - especially as someone who loves Ruby.

To the point though, I'm having trouble with one small thing in a project I'm working on, and that is creating a "mini-map" based on the larger tiled map that acts as the playfield. When it's just drawing the map itself it runs at a smooth 60FPS, but when I draw both the map and the mini-map (tile-by-tile, yes, so it's quite slow) it drops like a rock to 30-40 FPS on even a smallish map. Clearly this can be helped with some intelligent coding, so I would like to generate the mini-map as a dynamically-created image that's built when loading the map file and then just drawing that already-generated mini-map image that to save on unnecessary processing.

However, unless I'm missing something really obvious, I don't see any way that Gosu supports dynamically creating images and then drawing them. In fact, I don't see any way to draw things other than to a window at all. Any ideas or tips on how I could do this? I'd really appreciate it.