Need Help Actually Releasing a Game

By gardrek Date 2016-12-12 14:01 Edited 2016-12-12 14:34

I'm developing on Linux (using Ruby) and I've been trying recently to find a way to release Windows builds of my game (Mac OSX would be nice, too). I've looked into Traveling Ruby, but it doesn't support native extensions. I've looked at Releasy, but it uses Ruby 1.9 (which is no longer supported), and it hasn't been updated in years. I've heard of someone using OCRA, a but I don't want to have to install a bunch of Ruby stuff on a Windows partition I don't use just to release a Windows build of my game, and of course that doesn't help with OSX at all. If OCRA proves to be the only option, I guess I'm using it.

So, my main question is: What software are people using to release Gosu games, and is it available for Linux?

(P.S: My game isn't quite finished, but it's hard to muster the spoons to work on something most people won't see because they don't have Ruby experience.)

By jlnr (dev) Date 2016-12-12 14:44

This is the canonical macOS wrapper for Ruby/Gosu code: https://github.com/gosu/ruby-app

Moving code into Ruby.app should work just fine on Linux, as long as you are careful not to lose the executable bit on Ruby.app/Contents/MacOS/Ruby (which can happen if you create a ZIP archive). Just move your code in there, edit Info.plist, create a tarball and mail it to your Mac friends. They'll probably have to right-click and then 'Open' it because the .app isn't code-signed.

Ocra is the most common solution for Windows, but Releasy has another solution that is supposed to work from Linux:

https://github.com/Spooner/releasy/blob/master/lib/releasy/windows_wrapper_maker.rb

As far as I can tell, it bundles your game with the contents of a RubyInstaller package, and then creates a tiny EXE stub that runs rubyw.exe <your_game.rb>? You could give it a try - even though Releasy's README is outdated, that part of the code might still work with the current version of everything.

By gardrek Date 2016-12-12 15:17

Thanks for the response! The MacOS wrapper seems really easy to use. As for the Windows wrapper, I'm a little foggy, but I'm assuming rubyw.exe is just the standard Windows Ruby interpreter and I'll need a Gosu DLL or something in there too. At least the script seems to be well-commented about where to put everything. Thanks again for the help.