Dragons may be fictional but dragonriders are real in the world of dragonruby.

DragonRuby is a zero dependency, cross platform, Ruby runtime built on top of mRuby, libSDL, and LLVM and DragonRuby Game Toolkit, gtk, is a professional grade 2D game engine.

I was drawn into the dragonriders' lair by the dragonruby-classics-jam-gauntlet-edition, which led me to build a game under 2 weekends of ruby programming in gtk.

Figure 1: My first 2D game

Figure 1: My first 2D game

Here is a quick tour on how to be a dragon rider.

  1. Buy/Download the toolkit from https://dragonruby.org/toolkit/game

    • I had enrolled into the jam, so I downloaded the toolkit from itch.io

  2. Once you unzip the dragonruby zip, your folder structure would look like this

    Figure 2: drGtK folder structure

    Figure 2: drGtK folder structure

    In this folder structure,

    • dragonruby is the executable that you run to visualise your game
    • mygame folder will be your working directory, where you keep your game files, which gets auto-picked by dragonruby
    • samples folder has all the examples you need. It could even serve as a starting point for your games

  3. Click on the dragonruby executable and you can see a hello world game. Dont close this window, keep it open

    • How did this work? As I mentioned, dragonruby auto-magically picks the files in the mygame folder

  4. mygame folder has the following structure

    Figure 3: mygame folder structure

    Figure 3: mygame folder structure

  5. Open the main.rb file in the mygame/app folder, change “Hello World” to “Hello Universe”, save it

  6. Switch to the dragonruby window, you should see your universe and voila, you are a dragon rider in 6 steps !!!

The following links and videos can help you delve deeper into dragonruby:

For everything else, http://discord.dragonruby.org is the place to be. Its a thriving community with lot of folks ready to help you around the clock. Without this community, I might have never built my first game in ruby.

Happy coding!!!