Gosu is a 2D game development library for Ruby and C++.

It’s available for macOS, Windows, Linux, and iOS.

Gosu is focused, lightweight and has few dependencies (mostly SDL 2). It provides:

• a window and a main loop
• 2D graphics and text, powered by OpenGL or OpenGL ES
• sounds and music
• keyboard, mouse, and gamepad input

Gosu is mostly used to teach or learn Ruby or in short game development competitions. It’s also a great prototyping tool and should work for indie game development, though nobody has really tried that.

Resources

In addition to the documentation linked from the sidebar, there is a free book by Mark Sobkowicz that will guide you through the creation of four different games:

Both Gosu’s documentation and the book assume that you used Ruby before.

Some recent talks and screencasts about Gosu, or Ruby game development in general:

• RubyConf 2016 talk: Attention Rubyists: you can write video games, by Cory Chamblin (2016)
• An introduction to Ruby/Gosu, by Iván González (2015)
• Making a Flappy Bird clone in Ruby, by Tom Dalling (2015)
• LA Ruby Conf 2014 talk: Writing Games with Ruby, by Mike Moore (2014)
• Tutorial series: Conway’s Game of Life with Ruby/Gosu in vim, by ofcan (2013)
• Ruby Conf 2012 talk: Game Development and Ruby, by Andrew Nordman (2012)

Licensing

Gosu and all documentation © 2001-2024 Julian Raschke, Jan Lücker, and other contributors. Gosu is released under the MIT licence.