occasionally useful » games

Game ideas?

Max — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 04:26:31 +0000

Well, another day, another quest for game ideas. An online game would be fun to make, but my problem is always I think too damn big. My last idea was a Utopia clone, and I got so far as to create a scripting language that compiled into Ruby, but I just never got around to finishing it. What would be nice is a game that's fun in its simplicity -- simple to play, simple to program, just something you spend half an hour or an hour on a day, tops. There'd be a way to interact with other people easily; there'd be chat rooms and forums, and discernible "hot spots" where a lot of people were chatting or posting messages. But the most important thing is core gameplay: unique, rewarding, and fun. I'll get right on that...

Partial success!

Max — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:58:03 +0000

For a good chunk of yesterday, I was trying to ""port"" my exceedlingly simple Ruby application to Windows. The hitch? It uses Gosu (game engine), Chipmunk (physics engine), ImageMagick (popular graphics tool), and RMagick (wrapper for ImageMagick in Ruby). With the help of RubyScript2Exe it almost, almost worked. Gosu and Chipmunk had no problem, as they had no-strings-attached .so files and apparently were programmed well. ImageMagick, despite trying to be a pain in the ass by making me include an extra dozen DLLs in my project folder, actually did end up working. But RMagick...when moving the generated app to a new computer that didn't have ImageMagick installed freaked out with a weird "address not accessible" error or something. After some fiddling I gave it up as a lost cause and dropped support for ImageMagick+RMagick. The only reason they were there in the first place is because I wanted to load SVG files whenever possible, and possibly have some dynamic graphic generation, but...the former isn't that great anyway, and the latter will have to be done other ways, if at all.

So, yes, Ruby+Gosu+Chipmunk play just fine with RubyScript2Exe on both Windows and Linux.

Distributing Ruby Apps

Max — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:48:27 +0000

So I'm pondering the idea of writing a game...but I want it to be playable on Windows and Linux, and I want it to be available on Linux without much trouble. I've made a couple interesting discoveries, in terms of applications to help me do this.

The first is called RubyScript2Exe. It takes all the files needed by an application and sticks it into a single binary executable, as well as any dependencies. Cool huh? The only problem is the smallest program RubyScript2Exe can generate is 700k. Not so bad, but then I include the Gosu game library I'm using and it comes out to 7.0M. Compressing (7z, tar.gz, zip) doesn't get it past 6.7M. Oh well, after adding all the media and stuff I want I can't imagine it getting past 15M or 20M, which is acceptable when most people have >100 gigs of space. But not everyone has uber broadband...oh well. Anyway, it just seems larger than it needs to be is all.

The other application (by the same guy I think) is Tar2RubyScript. Tar2RubyScript does something similar to RubyScript2Exe, but instead of generating a binary, it generates a Ruby script. That is, it takes your directory tree of files and generates a single equivalent .rb file. Cool huh? It's like JAR files, but with less overhead and without compression.

So, ultimately, Windows will have just the binary and Linux will have a binary (for those without Ruby), the single Ruby script (for people who don't care about the source), and the full directory tree (for the inquisitive and those who can't get the other script to work).