A couple of years ago I participated in the VimJam2 GameJam and made the game The Boss and that was a fun experience where I tried out making a game in Unity (not really my thing.. just didn’t enjoy the process) but I think the humor became good and the music as well, so when VimJam4 came along this year I decided to jump in and try to make a variant of a rythm based game in DragonRuby.

https://nerdur.itch.io/tune-trail is the result.

It’s not a great game, but it didn’t take much time to make and I think I can build on this concept. The controlls are simple and with some design this can actually become fun to play.

Now, you might wonder why i chose to use DragonRuby, well. Its just feels right. I can code the game and I just need a command line and Emacs/VSCode or whatever. No installations.. And also the publishing system is excellent. I can simply just be a developer and understand this. I don’t need to be expert in a game engine. The concepts are simple and it just gets the job done and I can do the things I like. Develop.

I remember when making the Unity game the endless hours of trying to get a collision system to work correctly with the ground plane (it still doesn’t, its possible to fall through the floor..). This is trivial in DragonRuby. On the other hand, making a particle system in DragonRuby is probably a bit harder than in Unity where its just there. So what you use kind of depends on what you are making and WHY you are making it. I am making this for my enjoyment, so I use the tools I enjoy 🙂

As usual I put most energy into the tune. Hope you like it 🙂