Ruby/Gosu Packaging on Microsoft Windows (for Ruby 1.8)

To compile your Ruby game into an executable on Windows, you need to run it through the following program from the command line:

http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html

The 'rubyscript2exe' gem worked better for me than the standalone script file.

You can then ship the resulting .exe file together with your game's resources and, if you use sound, fmod.dll. (If you are using Gosu as a Ruby Gem, you can find fmod.dll in your gems directory, usually C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\gosu-x.x.x\lib\fmod.dll).

If you want to ship your game to be in a self-contained executable (similar to the .app bundle on Mac OS X), Erik Veenstra also has a guide to packaging a whole directory into a single .rb file.

http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/index.html

With a bit of experimentation, you can fit the whole game, including all resources, .dll's and even gosu.so into a single .exe file. Note that for licensing reasons, you should point out you are using FMOD then, as it cannot be seen from your game's files anymore.

Ruby/Gosu Packaging on Microsoft Windows (for Ruby 1.9)

The steps for packaging a Ruby 1.9 should be the same when using the Ocra tool:

http://github.com/larsch/ocra/tree/master

But in practice, I have found that I need to ship the .rb and .so files with my .exe file, so it seems there is still work going on in that project.