Gosu on iOS with mruby

By jlnr (dev) Date 2012-04-28 05:53

I've used the last Ludum Dare weekend to toy around with mruby on iOS:

https://github.com/jlnr/mruby_demo_game

It's basically a complete failure on device, but at least it shows a background in the simulator. I expect this to make progress by itself as mruby is updated - and the mruby project looks pretty busy so far.

I have my doubts that Ruby as a scripting language makes a lot of sense for iOS games - but it'd be nice to put a slow prototype on the App Store. If it goes viral with people on newer iOS devices, one can still port it to C++.

Hmm...

By jontebol Date 2012-10-28 12:14

I was just going to ask about mruby + Gosu for iOS dev... but I see you beat me to it! :)

My dream for game dev is getting Ruby+Gosu working for iOS, either through RubyMotion or mruby, which both seem like viable options.

Have you made any advances with this? Mruby should be a great fit for game dev in general since it can be embedded and has a more suitable garbage collector etc. It could finally allow for writing and distributing Ruby+Gosu games for any platform (minus web) without the Ruby requirement, just an executable game! :)

By jlnr (dev) Date 2012-11-03 22:54 Edited 2012-11-03 23:12

My experience was only moderately encouraging, and that was before RubyMotion was out. I think if I were to spend another weekend on it, I'd go for RubyMotion.

But I'm not likely to have a free weekend to spend on this topic soon :( If anyone wants to get Gosu to work with RubyMotion, I would certainly love to help out. I think it boils down to creating an Objective C wrapper around Gosu (something that I have done before for MacRuby), and its interface as seen by RubyMotion should be as similar to "normal" Ruby/Gosu as possible so that code is compatible.

By rremedio Date 2012-10-28 23:52

Any chances to make Gosu work with Rhomobile or at least the part of it which compiles Ruby to bytecode? Apps work on several OS including iOS, Android and Win32.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2012-11-03 23:03

Actually a Rhomobile dev was one of the first posters on the iOS board. As far as I understand it, they have compiled MRI into a single executable and shipped that along with source code, similar to how Ruby/Gosu packaging used to work on OS X. For iOS, it would make more sense to go with RubyMotion, and I don't know anything about Android (I have only done some NDK dev). :(