Ruby/Gosu Packaging on Mac OS X with the experimental Ruby 1.9.1 Bundle

The Mac package of Gosu (on the Downloads list) comes with a mysterious RubyGosu App.app bundle. All you have to do to share your game with the public is following these easy steps:

Duplicate this bundle, open its contents via the right-click menu
Edit the Info.plist file, and change at least the bundle identifier.
Copy your game files into the Contents/Resources subfolder (Gosu libraries are not necessary, they are built in)
Rename your game's main source file to Main.rb

And you're done! You now have a fully functional .app bundle.

The .app is a self-contained Ruby 1.9.1 (core) installation. This especially means that you need to put comments of the form # Encoding: UTF -8 on the first line of every source file that uses non-ASCII characters. If you need to use libraries other than Ruby's core and Gosu, see the Extending Gosu forum for advice.

Ruby/Gosu Packaging with the Light-Weight Ruby 1.8 Bundle

The older, better-tested method of packaging Ruby games for OS X involves the more lightweight RubyGosu Deployment Template.app that can be found as a separate download. Here you also have to put your game into the Contents/Resources folder, but you need to include the files in Gosu's lib folder as well, because Ruby is not built into this template. Actually, it just calls the OS X system Ruby to run your game.

If you want to ship RMagick with your game, see this useful forum thread by codekitchen.

Comment by diego.demiguel, Jun 16, 2008

Does the Mac OS X gosu.bundle include the FMOD library? If so, is there a way of removing the FMOD library in the gosu.bundle in Mac OS X, so that all code can be 100% free, even if the game lacks sound?

Comment by julianraschke, May 14, 2009

Updated response: Unfortunately yes. Please wait for the next version to use OpenAL on OS X. :)