Posted June 12, 2021 by nerdur
#dragonruby
The game has now been up in kind of ok form for about a week. It hasn't really gotten any attention or plays (not that strange, it's not especially fun nor has it been marketed in any way) and I doubt many people have played it in multiplayer (thus with other humans). I think as such the game is a success though. It was quite easy to make and it is playable. For a first game made with the Dragon Ruby toolkit I guess it is quite ok, and probably the other game I made a few months back, Sumur, that I made in Godot, could have been better done using a design like this where the client is using a game framework but the backend is a "standard" server framework.
I found Dragon Ruby to be very easy to work with and the iteration times are fast. Also I love that I can work in Emacs or Vi or whatever I feel like working in at the moment on and the iterations and publishing is all blazing fast. One of the things that keeps me away from Godot is that I simply don't like the editor and debugging in it is a bit cumbersome (especially networked games). The same for Unity and UE. They are all shiny and nice, but I am a bit of a command line type of person..
The networking in DragonRuby is lacking. I would like to have something like websockets or something a bit more flexible than just http, but hey, limitations force inventions.. Who wants a smooth game anyway.. Better with jerky. Or not. So yeah, it's a bit of an issue that I have to think a bit more around how to solve if I will continue to experiment with Dragon Ruby.
Now will I use it more? I don't know right now. Probably but it depends a bit on what I want to do next. I definetly like Ruby the language. I will continue to learn more about that as I get good old Lisp and Perl feelings when using it. It fits my way of coding and isn't in the way as much as many other languages are. Also the simplicity of Dragon Ruby is it's strength and probably what will have me use it for future experiments. The cost of starting is 0 and building something bottom up is just so easy and rewarding. I am not a plotter that has massive big ideas and build a game (or any kind of software) as a huge system from day one. I make small increments and then I refine them and build on them and Dragon Ruby is really built for that. Refining is easy and the whole system can be understood and kept in the head at once.
At the same time I would like to try out making something with Unity and UE as I haven't really tried them out and get a sense for them.
I hope they keep the discount on the pro version for a while more. I am considering to buy (for the android export, but perhaps also thinking that I can simply just patch the networking myself with a small c extention if I want to). But I haven't decided yet...