Gosu is a 2D game development library for the Ruby and C++ programming languages, available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. (MSVC++ 2005 needed for the Windows C++ version).

Short notice AGAIN! There is a Ruby-only weekend game development compo on the 25th! See http://tinyurl.com/5gufxw. A great opportunity to have fun, tweak one's time management and try out crazy stuff. Don't be shy if you're a newbie, you won't be afterwards! :)

Both the C++ and Ruby version provide:

• 2D graphics and text, accelerated by 3D hardware—i.e. blazingly fast rotations, scaling and color modulation
• Sound samples and music in various formats, based on the tested & optimized FMOD3 library
• Keyboard, mouse and gamepad/joystick input

Ruby/Gosu also features:

• Installation via gem install gosu on OS X & Windows, complete with examples
• RMagick integration, shown in an example game
• A tutorial on how to use the Chipmunk physics library with Gosu: RubyChipmunkIntegration, written by Dirk Johnson
• An example of how to use ruby-opengl to add rich 3D effects to 2D Gosu games

Documentation for each platform can be found on the DocsOverview page. On the GosuExchange page, questions can be posted and answers are collected. For other questions, friendly chat and random rants about this bitter world visit #gosu on irc.freenode.org.

Progress info: At the moment, fixing glitches and improving Linux support seem to be more helpful than adding new features, so anything new will have to wait a few months until I can start working on the 0.8.x series as outlined on the ToDo page. Expect a few more 0.7.9.x dot releases with more and more polish and stability until then. Also, feel free to request all sorts of things in the issue tracker or as a comment on the ToDo page!

Ruby gamedev overview: If you are coming from a Ruby background and haven't yet decided on a library or want to know about alternatives to Gosu, or if you haven't yet decided to even use Ruby, check out Andrea O. K. Wrights articles and her talk, which give a fair overview. Article (part 1) Article (part 2) Video of the talk (RubyConf '07)

Licensing Note: Even though Gosu's own source code and documentation are released under the MIT license, it uses the closed source FMOD library for sound output. FMOD is free of charge for freeware games though, and has very fair conditions otherwise. On Linux, if you build from source and FMOD is not present, SDL_mixer will be used as the default. You use 100% Free code in this case!

_{(Gosu and all documentation © 2001-2007 Julian Raschke, Jan Lücker and contributors.)}