Metro is a framework built around gosu (the 2D game development library in Ruby). The goal of Metro is to enforce common conceptual structures and conventions making it easier to quickly generate a game.

You want to develop games in Ruby.

Gosu does a lot of great work bringing OpenGL to Ruby. However, when you finish the initial tutorial you are left with a brittle game that is very resistant to changes or new features.

• Metro provides the concept of a Scene which is the first abstraction you would likely build after completing the tutorial.

Developing your game in individual scenes will make it easier to logically layout your game.

• Sane management of images, animations, fonts, songs, and samples through model properties.

Having to load and cache fonts and images in every one of your models is tedious. It is also is wasteful as several of the same fonts are being used all over the place.

• Key-frame animations

Metro makes it simple to move an actor from one position to another position. So simple movements, fades, color changes, and really any property change over time is defined very simply.

• Event Handling

Delete those huge if ... elsif ... else input checking structures for keyboard, gamepad, and mouse button presses (down,up, and held). Metro makes it easy to define them and an attach a course of action to take when the event happens.

Both Gamebox and Chingu are more mature libraries with a larger set of features. I encourage you to check out those libraries.

Metro's primary goal is to be a framework of features that make game development joyful.

• Active Reloading while building your scenes.

Adjustments to your game code while working on a scene will automatically reload your game code. The template game sets up a shortcut key (Ctrl+R) that allows you to explicitly reload the game and the current scene.

• Scene Edit Support

Scenes can enter an edit mode which allows you to re-position actors within the scene. The changes can then be saved back to the view. This allows you to fine tune the layout of those scene elements, making it easier to get things pixel perfect.

Metro's secondary goal is to make it easier for individuals familiar with Rails get into game development. That is the reason for some of the design choices, the opinionated structure, and generators that come with Metro.

Metro has some the following limitations:

• Limited to the gems defined within Metro

At this point in time you are not able to define and package additional dependencies with your game. This means if you are using a gem that is not already defined by Metro you will run into trouble when running it on alternate systems. This will likely be addressed in the future when more demand arises.

• Difficult Deployment

For individuals to play your game, they will also have to install Metro. However, work is being made to bring some simple packaging to Metro games to make them stand-along executables.

$ gem install metro

By default metro will look for a file named 'metro' within the current working directory if no gamefilename has been provided.

$ metro GAMEFILENAME

Please take a look at the example game project that is being built alongside of 'metro'. It currently showcases all the current features available to the game.

$ git clone git://github.com/burtlo/starry-knight.git
$ cd starry-knight
$ metro

Metro contains content generators to assist you.

Creating a Game can be done with a single command.

$ metro new GAMENAME

This should generate for you a starting game with a branding scene, title scene and first game scene. The game allows the player to start the game.

The Metro wiki contains lots of documentation:

• Game Configuration
• Scenes
• Views
• Animations
• Scene Transitions
• Models
• Metro Models
• Model Properties
• Events
• Units

• YAML for Ruby reference which can help you define views in the game.
• JSONLint is a JSON Validator

• Lost Garden
• TimelineFX particle editor allows you to export animations.
• Text to ASCII Art Generator
• Icons
• Subtle Patterns various backgrounds and textures.

• as3sfxr generates unique sounds.
• Ableton music generation tool.

• Rules of Play
• Game Programming Gems 8
• Game Feel
• Game Coding Complete
• Game Design Workshop
• Challenges For Game Designers
• The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
• A Theory of Fun
• Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design