Hello World Tutorial#

Part 1#

By Ryan 'The Juggernaut' Gordon


Here's just a little push to get you started if you're new to programming or game development.

If you want to write a game, it's no different than writing any other program for any other framework: there are a few simple rules that might be new to you, but more or less programming is programming no matter what you are building.

Did you not know that? Did you think you couldn't write a game because you're a "web guy" or you're writing Java at a desk job? Stop letting people tell you that you can't, because you already have everything you need.

Here, we're going to be programming in a language called "Ruby." In the interest of full disclosure, I (Ryan "The Juggernaut" Gordon) wrote the C parts of this toolkit and Ruby looks a little strange to me (Amir Rajan wrote the Ruby parts), but I'm going to walk you through the basics because we're all learning together, and if you mostly think of yourself as someone that writes C (or C++, C#, Objective-C), PHP, or Java, then you're only a step behind me right now.

Here's the most important thing you should know: Ruby lets you do some complicated things really easily, and you can learn that stuff later. I'm going to show you one or two cool tricks, but that's all.

Part 2#

Do you know what an if statement is? A for-loop? An array? That's all you'll need to start.

Ok, here are few rules with regards to game development with GTK:

  • Your game is all going to happen under one function...
  • ...that runs 60 times a second...
  • ...and has to tell the computer what to draw each time.

That's an entire video game in one run-on sentence.

Here's that function. You're going to want to put this in mygame/app/main.rb, because that's where we'll look for it by default. Load it up in your favorite text editor.

  def tick args
    args.outputs.labels << [ 580, 400, 'Hello World!' ]

Now run dragonruby ...did you get a window with "Hello World!" written in it? Good, you're officially a game developer!

mygame/app/main.rb, is where the Ruby source code is located. This looks a little strange, so I'll break it down line by line. In Ruby, a '#' character starts a single-line comment, so I'll talk about this inline.

  # This "def"ines a function, named "tick," which takes a single argument
  #  named "args". DragonRuby looks for this function and calls it every
  #  frame, 60 times a second. "args" is a magic structure with lots of
  #  information in it. You can set variables in there for your own game state,
  #  and every frame it will updated if keys are pressed, joysticks moved,
  #  mice clicked, etc.
  def tick args

    # One of the things in "args" is the "outputs" object that your game uses
    #  to draw things. Afraid of rendering APIs? No problem. In DragonRuby,
    #  you use arrays to draw things and we figure out the details.
    #  If you want to draw text on the screen, you give it an array (the thing
    #  in the [ brackets ]), with an X and Y coordinate and the text to draw.
    #  The "<<" thing says "append this array onto the list of them at
    #  args.outputs.labels)

Once your tick function finishes, we look at all the arrays you made and figure out how to draw it. You don't need to know about graphics APIs. You're just setting up some arrays! DragonRuby clears out these arrays every frame, so you just need to add what you need right now each time.

Part 3#

Now let's spice this up a little.

We're going to add some graphics. Each 2D image in DragonRuby is called a "sprite," and to use them, you just make sure they exist in a reasonable file format (png, jpg, gif, bmp, etc) and specify them by filename. The first time you use one, DragonRuby will load it and keep it in video memory for fast access in the future. If you use a filename that doesn't exist, you get a fun checkerboard pattern!

There's a "dragonruby.png" file included, just to get you started. Let's have it draw every frame with our text:

  def tick args
    args.outputs.sprites << [ 576, 100, 128, 101, 'dragonruby.png' ]

(ProTip: you don't have to restart DragonRuby to test your changes; when you save main.rb, DragonRuby will notice and reload your program.)

That .sprites line says "add a sprite to the list of sprites we're drawing, and draw it at position (576, 100) at a size of 128x101 pixels". You can find the image to draw at dragonruby.png.

Quick note about coordinates: (0, 0) is the bottom left corner of the screen, and positive numbers go up and to the right. This is more "geometrically correct," even if it's not how you remember doing 2D graphics, but we chose this for a simpler reason: when you're making Super Mario Brothers and you want Mario to jump, you should be able to add to Mario's y position as he goes up and subtract as he falls. It makes things easier to understand.

Also: your game screen is always 1280x720 pixels. If you resize the window, we will scale and letterbox everything appropriately, so you never have to worry about different resolutions.

Ok, now we have an image on the screen, let's animate it:

  def tick args
    args.state.rotation ||= 0
    args.outputs.sprites << [ 576, 100, 128, 101, 'dragonruby.png', args.state.rotation ]
    args.state.rotation -= 1

Now you can see that this function is getting called a lot!

Here's a fun Ruby thing: args.state.rotation ||= 0 is shorthand for "if args.state.rotation isn't initialized, set it to zero." It's a nice way to embed your initialization code right next to where you need the variable.

args.state is a place you can hang your own data and have it survive past the life of the function call. In this case, the current rotation of our sprite, which is happily spinning at 60 frames per second. If you don't specify rotation (or alpha, or color modulation, or a source rectangle, etc), DragonRuby picks a reasonable default, and the array is ordered by the most likely things you need to tell us: position, size, name.

One thing we decided to do in DragonRuby is not make you worry about delta time: your function runs at 60 frames per second (about 16 milliseconds) and that's that. Having to worry about framerate is something massive triple-AAA games do, but for fun little 2D games? You'd have to work really hard to not hit 60fps. All your drawing is happening on a GPU designed to run Fortnite quickly; it can definitely handle this.

Since we didn't make you worry about delta time, you can just move the rotation by 1 every time and it works without you having to keep track of time and math. Want it to move faster? Subtract 2.

Now, let's move that image around.

  def tick args
    args.state.rotation ||= 0
    args.state.x ||= 576
    args.state.y ||= 100

    if args.inputs.mouse.click
      args.state.x = args.inputs.mouse.click.point.x - 64
      args.state.y = args.inputs.mouse.click.point.y - 50

    args.outputs.sprites << [ args.state.x, args.state.y, 128, 101, 'dragonruby.png', args.state.rotation ]

    args.state.rotation -= 1

Everywhere you click your mouse, the image moves there. We set a default location for it with args.state.x ||= 576, and then we change those variables when we see the mouse button in action. You can get at the keyboard and game controllers in similar ways.

There is a lot more you can do with DragonRuby, but now you've already got just about everything you need to make a simple game. After all, even the most fancy games are just creating objects and moving them around. Experiment a little. Add a few more things and have them interact in small ways. Want something to go away? Just don't add it to args.output anymore.