DragonRuby is a wonderful, easy to work with engine. It's exactly what I need- no GUI-based elements, just code. It gives me the sense of badassery that coding some adventure game in a raw Assembler in the 1980s would, except it's not some Assembler... it's Ruby! You know, that super expressive language that is actually kind to developers? I've already produced some small projects for the Teeny-Tiny Game Jam that ran over the course of October 2021, and I have another, much bigger project in the works.

If you're uncomfortable with working in Ruby, or if you want to make a 3d, high-fidelity, AAA-level production value genre-altering block-buster game with millions of on-screen particles and a real-time simulation of the universe, DragonRuby may not be for you. As a philosophy, DR sacrifices some raw performance for the sake of the developer's headaches. It will not be as fast as code written in pure C, although, what it slightly lacks in performance at runtime it more than makes up for in ease of use (if you factor in compile time and write time, it wants to be the fastest thing on the market).  Its arrays and hashes are powerful and versatile, the rendering pipeline exposed to you is simple and just as versatile, but Ruby's amazing expressiveness comes at a cost under the hood... And yet, they're working on that, too. DragonRuby aims to be a competitive, viable alternative to other game engines, and in my opinion, I'd say it's got them all beat in the area that secretly matters most- Dev!! Friendliness!!