Now for something a little different! Ryan "Icculus" Gordon, a name known for many Linux ports and SDL2 teamed up with indie developer Amir Rajan to create a new cross-platform toolkit.
Why was it created? Well, in a nutshell they both "hate the complexity of today's engines" and this toolkit was actually made to help ship A Dark Room for the Nintendo Switch, which shows how versatile it is.
Feature Highlight:
- Dirt simple apis capable of creating complex 2D games.
- Fast as hell. Powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon himself.
- Battle tested by Amir Rajan. A Dark Room for the Nintendo Switch was built with DragonRuby GTK.
- Tiny. Like really tiny. The entire engine is a few megabytes.
- Hot loaded, realtime coding, optimized to provide constant feedback to the dev. Productive and an absolute joy to use.
- Turn key builds for Windows, MacOS, and Linux with seamless publishing to Itch.io.
- Built in modding support. You don't have to do anything. It just works.
- Cross platform: iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, XBOX One, and PS4.
Ryan Gordon even did a video to demonstrate how easy it can be:
Direct Link
To me, as someone who doesn't make games I find tools like this fascinating. Especially how seemingly quickly, as shown in the video, you can get something running with it on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Hopefully highlighting it might be helpful to some actual game developers who follow our news.
You can check it out here on itch.io and the original announcement from Ryan Gordon on Twitter.
Quoting: trawzI'm learning some Ruby at the moment to develop a website with Rails, coming from some C# ASP.NET MVC 5 experience it's pretty good and much more Linux-friendly so far. Game development with it also sounds Interesting to say the least!I really wish the game industry as a whole wasn't trending towards C#. Oh well.
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