Game Developer and CEO of DragonRuby, Amir Rajan returns to the show. He joins the rogues to talk about DragonRuby. DragonRuby is a zero dependency, cross-platform, Ruby runtime built on top of mRuby, libSDL, and LLVM. Additionally, Amir talks about how it allows you to use the Ruby language to build video games. He also shares his experiences when it comes to working with mruby.

Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Ruby Rogues Podcast. This week on our panel, we have Valentino Stoll.

 

And now...

 

We also have Luke Stutters.

 

Hello.

 

I'm Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs, and we have a special guest this week. It's Amir Rajan. Amir, welcome back.

 

Happy to be back. It's been a while. I think it's been at least a few years now.

 

Yeah, you're gonna make me go look it up, aren't you?

 

I'm going to make you go look it up.

 

Yeah, it's been a while, but yeah, what's new with you?

 

Let's see, we'll survive the apocalypse. So that's always a good thing. And I'm still doing game development. So that part hasn't changed. And of course, with Dragon Ruby, we just celebrated our three-year anniversary of the product. So

 

Nice.

 

that would be the new thing. That would be the new thing. Everything else is same old, same old, which is a good thing.

 

Yeah, so the episode that I'm finding is episode 333, which was back in 2017, about this time of year, 2017. Back when it was still Ruby Motion. I think you had just taken it over and, yeah,

 

Yeah, and we still

 

we're

 

have

 

doing all the things.

 

a RubyMotion. Well, so Dragon Ruby, the naming things, naming things,

 

Right?

 

it's the worst. So the company and the LLP is called Dragon Ruby, and then

 

Mm-hmm.

 

RubyMotion is a Dragon Ruby product, and GameToolkit is a Dragon Ruby product. It's just really annoying to say Dragon Ruby, RubyMotion.

 

Ah, okay.

 

But yeah, so it's Dragon Ruby, GameToolkit, Dragon Ruby, Ruby Motion. And hopefully some rebranding on Ruby Motion will happen. It'll potentially be called App Toolkit. But it's

 

Mm-hmm.

 

one of those things that's like, all right, now I gotta buy a domain and all those. So

 

Right?

 

it's just Ruby Motion, but Ruby Motion's still around. And then we added this additional product being Game Toolkit.

 

Okay, that makes sense. My son wants to be a game developer, so this may be a way that we do it. I don't know.

 

Oh, yeah. It's actually worked pretty well with workshops and young kids because

 

Yeah.

 

everything's hot-loaded. So

 

Mm-hmm.

 

instead of going through the fundamentals of, OK, here's how you type an if statement and all the boring stuff, you just bring up one of the sample apps I usually recommend, Flappy Dragon, and just bring it up and start tweaking the values and just see how things change. And I think younger audiences, even older ones, I mean, it's just great to have that feature. engage with that because they'll say, oh, what if I change the gravity from 9.2 to 15? What happens? And

 

Right.

 

seeing that update live, it's just a really great feeling. So I think you'll

 

Yep.

 

have a good time with it.

 

Yeah, he's been taking programming classes at the high school and they have a game development

 

You're welcome.

 

class and so I think they're teaching him C sharp and unity.

 

Yep, that's usually the standard. Don't do it. It's horrible.

 

Ha ha ha!

 

It's so horrible. But we can go into the motivation and all that stuff in a little bit, but it's

 

Yeah.

 

rough.

 

say I downloaded that Flappy Dragon game and it ran no problem. It was really cool.

 

Yeah,

 

So

 

and.

 

kudos. I mean it's not often you can just download something and

 

and double

 

you know

 

click

 

that's

 

it and

 

very

 

it worked.

 

complicated. It just works.

 

Yes. Yeah. And, and that was like one of the biggest motivators that I had was that you unzip the file and just double click the runtime and, and it starts up. It's zero dependency. It was just, it feels so good to

 

Oh

 

be able

 

nice.

 

to do that. And you're just like, wait, that's it. It's like, yeah, you just double. And it runs on, uh, we have it completely cross platform and we made sure to make, to make sure that it ran on Raspberry Pis.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

and stuff, you get your kid a tiny Raspberry Pi computer, and it can run Dragon Ruby. It's really important to us, so I'm really happy that that just kind of worked for you.

 

Nice. So it sounds like it's kind of easy to get started, but let's just

 

Mm-hmm.

 

back up for the people who haven't heard from you in four years,

 

Right.

 

or are new to the Ruby community and just haven't run across RemuOcean or Dragon Ruby. You wanna kind of give the, I guess, the elevator pitch or the five second, hey, what is this thing that we're talking about?

 

Right. And I think that would really help. So Dragon Ruby is a custom Ruby runtime that is completely cross-platform and zero dependency. So the idea there is that you are able to get up and running using the Ruby programming language and build, you can build applications, I guess. They're a little bit more boring than video games, but it lets you build cross-platform video games and deploy cross-platform. iOS, Android, web, PC, Mac, Linux, console, all the things. So it's a super, super lean, refined runtime or runtime and machinery that allows you to use Ruby for video game development. And that's what Dragon Ruby is.

 

Awesome. So you build apps like you would think of just an app, right, with input fields and whatever it does. And you can also build

 

Right?

 

video games.

 

Totally, yes.

 

And you said it's cross-platform so I can run it on my phone, I can run it on my computer, wherever I want.

 

Yep, phone, iOS and Android, PC, Mac, Linux. You can do a web build, so WASM is a target export, and

 

Oh

 

the

 

nice.

 

consoles, because I have a video game on the Nintendo Switch that uses Dragon Ruby. So you can deploy the consoles, and it all just works. And

 

Nice,

 

that

 

and

 

was

 

you have

 

the

 

a-

 

most important part, yeah. Just to make it work

 

Yeah,

 

everywhere.

 

I guess the other the other pieces is, you know, when we were talking, yeah, my son's learning C sharp and unity at school. So I mean, that gives you like physics engines and, you know, some 3D capabilities and, you know, stuff like that. So you can do all that in Dragon Ruby as well.

 

That's a great question. So with regards to what Dragon Ruby's specialization is, 2D games. So

 

Okay.

 

if you want the lean, mean, it just works kind of experience for 2D games, there's no competition with regards to between Dragon Ruby and Unity. Now, the interesting thing is that when the Oculus Quest came out, we started thinking about, well, how do we transition into this 3D world? like the existing desktop 3D market is kind of oversaturated. I mean, there's a lot of

 

Mm-hmm.

 

competition there. And personally, Unreal, they eat their own dog food. It's a phenomenal engine. It's just great. So like the 3D space, I think, the contenders, specifically with Unreal, it didn't make a lot of sense for us to go into that space. But the interesting thing was that when I got my Oculus Quest I bet do any of you have a VR device or Oculus?

 

Yeah, we have two oculuses here.

 

It's magical. It was so magical.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And I was like, oh my gosh, you know what? You know what would be awesome? If we could build VR games using Ruby and have it hot loaded to the device and just kind of work. Not a AAA title. I'm just an indie dev, like one guy, but I wanna build

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Space Invaders in VR and have the enemies come towards me. Is that something I can do? So our 3D offering ends up being skip desktop 3D completely, and we just went straight to VR. So it's still in its early phases, and we've got quite a few sample apps out there. But it brings the, I guess, the barrier to entry down so low where if you know how to build a 2D game with Dragon Ruby, you add a Z to your sprite properties or your primitive properties,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

and suddenly you have a 2D object that can be turned and manipulated in 3D space. And it's just phenomenal from that perspective. But yeah, the short answer, 2D games, no competition. VR, if you want to jump into VR without any of that intimidation, Dragon Ruby is the way to do it.

 

So Amir, how does that work?

 

How does

 

Ha

 

that

 

ha ha

 

work?

 

ha!

 

Holy

 

Like

 

crap.

 

how do you get Ruby to run, let's say specifically

 

Yes.

 

for VR, right? Like if we're working on the Oculus platform, like how does that process work? Is it easy? I can't imagine it is.

 

This is like the rest of the owl, right? So it's complicated. But I think it's really interesting to talk about because it kind of reframes some of the terms that we use that developers use with regards to comparing languages and runtimes. And so roll up your sleeves, let's get into some of the technical stuff, I guess. All right, so when I initially talked about Dragon Ruby, I said that it's a runtime. is that when people talk about a language and we say, oh, I use Ruby, we usually mean Ruby language spec 3.0 plus on the C Ruby runtime. That's kind

 

Right.

 

of what we're abbreviating and saying. And so when someone says, oh, I do game development with Unity, you're using the C sharp 6. The six-out-of-all language is phenomenal. Unity butchers it. I'm gonna rag on Unity throughout this podcast. I'm sorry.

 

That's fine.

 

It's my favorite thing to pick on. But they're on the C-sharp language spec and the Unity runtime. So, and Unity was originally based off of the Mono runtime, and then it

 

Mm-hmm.

 

diverged and they created their own extensions and stuff. So that's kind of the caveat when I talk about and then the runtime. So then now the question is like, how do you make a runtime and how does it work cross platform? Well, that was the thing is that when you have the language specification, the CRuby runtime, I think it recently got WASM capabilities, but it wasn't something that supported WASM. And I imagine it'd be really difficult to get it to work on iOS and Android. I couldn't get it working on console, primarily because

 

Mm-hmm.

 

there's an assumption that the executing process are PC, Mac, and Linux, right? The

 

Right.

 

Nintendo Switch OS is not, does not have the same OS infrastructure that these other operating systems have. So you have the dependency as that runtime, even though it's Ruby. So what we ended up doing was like, okay, well, how can we make this cross platform? And our entry point was actually mRuby. runtime, embedded Ruby runtime, which is phenomenal because it doesn't have any dependencies on the operating system. So with that kind of isolated Ruby implementation that can just be invoked from any C library or C executable, we started with that and then expanded around that to say, okay, now can we make a truly cross platform access and truly cross platform rendering engine and truly cross platform IO and what does that look like. So that was that's where a lot of our work was. So we we took mruby as an initial starting point and then fleshed out that outer shell to make it usable across all these different environments. Now the good thing there is that when it comes to cross platform multimedia there's a library out there that already does this stuff and it's called lib sdl simple direct media layer. our hard dependency, instead of being standard libraries across each specific OS, we take a hard dependency on libSDL and use that facade to execute, render, and do all the things across all these different environments. So during the porting of the Nintendo Switch stuff, I hacked something together. And then Ryan C. Gordon, he's Ickles on Twitter. He's like the SDL guy. on a Steam game on Linux, chances are he's probably helped port that specific game over. So he's pretty much a juggernaut in that industry. And during the switchboard, I was like, hey, this is my crazy idea. What do you think? He's never used Ruby. He's like, let's do it. So I brought him on as a partner. And he's a core maintainer and core contributor to STL. And now he's part of Dragon Ruby itself. kind of what, and then I said, hey, figure this out. And he figured out the details of it. And then I handled the interrupt between mruby and libSDL. So he handled the layer from the OS to SDL, make sure all that stuff works. And I handled the layer from SDL up into Ruby. And that's kind

 

My brain's

 

of how,

 

still going, I can write Switch games.

 

yeah,

 

But that's cool.

 

you can write, you can write Nintendo. The beauty of it is that you write it on your machine, one single code base, it will run everywhere. And

 

So.

 

that was really important to me because at this point I have like six or seven games out there. And the upkeep is so difficult. Like every year a new iOS device comes out or a new Android device comes out or a new console. And just dealing with all the vendor fragmentation, it was just, games because I was so busy with the upkeep. And that's when I said, OK, I need to take a pause for literally three years to try to solve this problem so I can continue doing what I love and building video games. So of course, yeah, it's like, hey, I'm just going to write the game engine. Forget it. Let's just do that. And so as the saying goes, we do these things not because they were easy, but because we thought they were easy. we are. So

 

That's just,

 

that's how you

 

it's

 

build

 

so

 

a runtime.

 

cool.

 

That's how

 

So.

 

you build a runtime.

 

So video game platforms, just a sec, because you mentioned like the desktop platforms and the mobile platforms, but can

 

Mm-hmm.

 

you run it on like Xbox or PlayStation or any of those as well?

 

Totally. Yep. Absolutely. You need to have, you need to sign your NDAs and you have to have like the dev kids and stuff. But once we verify it, you're ready to rock. And the reason it's so easy for me to say, yeah, it's going to work. It goes back to that explanation. So our runtime is embedded. And the layer

 

Mm-hmm.

 

around the runtime that handles all the multimedia is libSTL. And

 

Alright.

 

like Valve uses this. The entire Steam client is built in libSTL. So this thing, that library is just, that we're taking. So we basically said, okay, if we were gonna do Ruby all over again, what dependency do we take on at the OS level? And

 

Mm-hmm.

 

our air quotes correct answer is libSDL. And that's what solves, that's what solved our cross platform challenges.

 

That's so cool. I have so many follow ups, but I'm going to try and focus them.

 

I don't,

 

What's yours?

 

if y'all don't see me for a month.

 

I mean, yeah, I totally want to start making a ton of games now, right?

 

Uh-huh.

 

So

 

But

 

you can actually go to fiddle.dragrangruby.org. And it's got a code editor and a window that's 16 by 9, but it's 160 pixels by 90 pixels. And

 

Oh wow.

 

you can just type, hello world. There's a hello world that loads up. And you save, and it runs. It loads in the environment. And it's wild. It's completely crazy that I just that just kind of works. And one of the tutorials is there's like a jump tutorial. And the last one is like you fly through space. And it does kind of like a parallax view of flying through space. And it just all works in the browser. And it's.

 

That's awesome. That's the WASM stuff that's

 

Yeah,

 

running

 

that's

 

up.

 

the wisdom stuff. Yep.

 

Oh, that's so cool. So what's your experience like working with mRuby? I'll admit my experience is pretty limited to like just making some LEDs blink on the Raspberry Pi.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

But...

 

Yeah, so the caveat, and this goes back to the idea of like, so what is the runtime, right? So the mruby runtime, it doesn't have all the things that the Ruby runtime would have. Example would be, I guess, UUIDs are like for base64 encoding, you can't run Rails on it because it doesn't have all the out of process communications that you have there. But the core standard lib pretty freaking fleshed out. And as far as the compiler options, you can, there's enough configuration in there where you can turn the dial between super lightweight and I'm running on a machine that can, you know, have a bigger like memory stack and object heap and all that good stuff. So we took the mruby, initial mruby configuration and was like, well, on anything leaner than maybe a raspberry pi. So we can turn a lot of these dials up. So, and we just kind of did that. We just turned up a lot of those dials. And then for things that, we did additional optimizations to like the threading model and just the whole like event loop. So Dragon Ruby actually has an event loop similar to Node.js. So instead of having threads that you initialize, you do an async call. re-entrancy of the message pump, you pull to see if that specific action is completed. So that's like a difference, right? So what's so different about mruby versus dragonruby? Well, dragonruby has a message pump, an event loop that mruby doesn't have, right? So those are kind of some of the interesting nuances there, but we turned all those dials up tuning specifically with rendering and libSTL. And we're to a point where, like, I'll post a YouTube link to y'all, but I do a demo where I render 20,000 sprites on the screen. And it's like they fly up into the right, like, a starry night thing. And then I do the same thing in Unity. See, there I go picking on Unity again.

 

Ha

 

And

 

ha ha ha ha!

 

Unity gets like eight frames a second. frames a second. So

 

Oh wow.

 

it's fast. And you'll always hear, well, Ruby is slow. And just to beat that dead horse, a language can't be slow.

 

Yeah.

 

A runtime can be slow. But a language is a language spec. So...

 

Have you tried JavaScript?

 

Have I tried JavaScript? So there is a C Sharp implementation that I think is called sharp.js from back in the day. And that's a common thing I bring up. It's like, well, OK, so if I write this program in sharp.js, write it in.NET Core, and then write it in Mono, aren't they all C Sharp? Aren't they all going to be fast? It's like, well, no, this other thing is going to be slower. And that's like the aha moment.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

your runtime is bloated, it's got a lot of, it's heavyweight. And it had to be because

 

to jump

 

of,

 

on this unity thing

 

yeah.

 

because my brother is right now building a game in unity and it's not going very well so I've been trying to get

 

chart.

 

him to move absolutely true and I need some like tangible reasons why he needs to move because he's not really worried about performance this really simple educational game you know but he's using the C sharp stuff as we say so

 

Right.

 

how can I sell this to him as an existing Unity developer.

 

So I think the biggest, so historically over this three year period I've gotten a lot of these questions and initially I started with objective stuff like oh it's faster, da da da da da, and give all these different reasons on the performance and everything and it never works. So I think, so over time what I found out was that the best thing I can say is if you're at a studio, getting overworked and underpaid to work on someone else's dreams, learn Unity.

 

Ooh, sign me up.

 

That's the best thing to do. It's 100% true, right? If that's what you want, if you want to be in the industry, work 80 hours a week, get underpaid, and then get laid off after the release of the game, use Unity. And if you want a fighting chance yourself as a one to two person team and actually have a chance of it releasing and making even a small amount of sustainable income, you have to use DragonRuby because that is my business model. That's how I survive, right? It's these micro teams and I can't afford to have to deal with cross-platform issues. I don't have the capital. I can't throw money and bodies at a problem. to use an engine that understands that and doesn't put me in that position. And Dragon Ruby is that engine. So if you're a brother, I think, you said I was your brother or friend, your brother,

 

This is my

 

if

 

brother,

 

he wants to,

 

yeah, this is my real

 

yeah,

 

life

 

if he

 

brother.

 

wants this educational

 

He's doing it for

 

game,

 

real.

 

yeah, if he wants this educational game to actually release and run from day one on everything that he wants to run it on, I mean, Dragon Ruby is your best bet. And then we have got our community discord and I'm there and I'm there to help, right? I'm there to help anyone that's in the same shoes that I'm in. And I think

 

I would.

 

that drives the point home much more than the objective aspects of it.

 

I love that. I'm totally on board with this thinking too.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I'd love to dive in more on the why not Unity because

 

Mm hmm.

 

historically I think a lot of people are attracted to Unity primarily for their physics engine, right? That just comes built in.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

What is Dragon Ruby doing that can also like give that, you know, feature set that a lot of people do?

 

So here's the plot twist. And you can try it yourself. Nobody uses the built-in physics engine. Nobody that has a real game out there uses the built-in physics engine. They just don't do it. So Celeste, hand-rolled physics engine. their physics engine. They did not use the built-in stuff. And what happens is you use the built-in stuff, and then you find that it doesn't work. You have clipping issues. There's inconsistent. There's non-deterministic simulation as far as taking an input and then making the collision actually work. That doesn't work. And then the complexity is there. So you've got, I want Mario to jump up and down. And that's it. So I've got a vector for the power in the x and y direction, gravity, and drag. I don't have to set restitution, elasticity, apply all these different meshes and materials to it to do something. So there's this aspect of this massive complexity just trying to understand how to use the physics engine in itself. I think for 3D games, it makes total sense. You need to have those facilities in place, and it's probably worth the effort. For 2D games, it's just not worth it. So the built-in physics engine, you go on Twitch, find some random streamer that's doing Unity, and has gotten pretty far in the game, and ask them if they use the built-in physics engine. The answer is always going to be no. It just doesn't work. So this is a little checkbox.

 

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

 

So what does Dragon Ruby do? It's a silly little checkbox. It's like, check this box. We have a physics engine. It does not work. But it's there. And so what Dragon Ruby does is that we don't have a built-in physics engine, but we have, I think, like, at this point, 15, 20 sample apps that show different facets of physics. So

 

Mm-hmm.

 

what does ball physics look like? How do you do simulate, you know, bouncing ball? What does axis-align bounding box collision look like? What does physics for a platformer look like? What does physics look like for a vertical platformer? All those, like, what does rope physics look like? We've got a game that simulates, like, ninja rope. It's called Klepto Frog. And you're a frog that steals mugs every night. And then every morning, the people come back to the office and have to take the mugs back out of your little aquarium place. So and use your tongue as a swinging mechanism. So we've got all these, like, in Flappy Dragon, as you know, you've got your flying physics and gravity

 

Right.

 

physics there. What we're trying to, what I'm trying to frame it as is that you've got this game that you want to try to build and here's a starting point for the concepts that you need to understand to build that kind of, that specific type of physics experience. And then from there it's tweaking, it's expanding, and making it feel good for what you're trying to build up. And it's worked really well for us. If you want, there's something called Chipmunk 2D, which is a C-based physics library. And so you'll need an ND license or above for using C extensions, but any physics engine out there that is written in, that's written in C and C++ can be integrated into Dragon Ruby as a foreign function interface. So if you wanna bring in Chipmunk 2D or, I think Box2D is Java, but Chipmunk 2D is my go-to if you really wanna do some crazy physics stuff. But you bring it in, expose those bindings to Ruby, got your physics engine at that point. But

 

That's awesome.

 

that's, that's how we do it. The built-in

 

Yeah,

 

physics

 

I mean

 

engine

 

I.

 

does

 

Thanks for watching!

 

not work people. I promise.

 

How is your performance using FFI? It is have you notice any likes? You know resource bogged down, especially

 

Thanks for watching!

 

on like Raspberry Pi as an example.

 

So that's the interesting thing about mruby and cruby is that all the core Ruby classes are form function interfaces, right? They're all written in C. So FFI is just, is basically saying, I'm gonna implement this Ruby object in C as opposed to plain old Ruby. So the FFI is really fast because it's intrinsic to the entire language itself. And then as far as generating those bindings, we've got a CLI tool that will generate your Ruby bindings for you and expose it as a Ruby class that you can interact with. So that's one of the niceties that we added to, instead of having to manually construct your Ruby objects using the mruby API. We provide a means where you point it to a header file and it's able to generate your Ruby bindings. findings for you.

 

So I'm curious what you're doing in Dragon Ruby, maybe specifically, that makes FFI kind of safe. Because I thought there was like kind of some thread safety issues in using FFI. Is there something

 

Right.

 

you're doing special? I know you talked briefly about how you're handling those async calls. Is there anything beyond that maybe?

 

Yeah. I think that's the linchpin as far as the async

 

Thanks for watching!

 

calls, was that our eventing model, you basically had a time slice. So your simulation and your game loop runs at 60 hertz. we fire up the VM, invoke the tick, the entry point, which is tick, and you get to do whatever you want within that time slice. You can go over, but at that point, you're basically stalling your game. So once that time slice is done, it basically, air quotes, shuts down, and then the rest of the world, the rest of the C world does its thing. we know our synchronization point. It's at the beginning of, it's at the re-entrancy of that VM loop. And that simplified a lot of things. So there's never a situation where a C struct is interacting with a Ruby object effectively at the same time. And it just kind of worked. Yeah.

 

I never thought of it that way because you're right, game development is frame by frame. You have a very

 

It

 

specific

 

is. Yep.

 

allotment and time-based entry points.

 

Yep.

 

It simplifies the whole system at that point.

 

It does. And

 

So how much have you augmented mruby to handle that? Is it a lot of upkeep to deal with that kind of process?

 

Yeah, so the upkeep is there. So to briefly talk about some of the niceties of the event loop is that we can aggressively GC because of that same reason. Because at the beginning of that entrance, we can do a major GC event. before we delegate to your game. So that synchronization point is really awesome. We can do a lot of cool things there. Aside from that, yeah, the upkeep. So the Ruby code base is about, I think, 12 to 13 lines of code for the runtime. And after this three year period, the customizations we've added on top of it that. And yeah. So we've doubled, air quotes doubled the size of the runtime. Generally, we try not to touch the Ruby runtime itself, so we can always rebase and merge and kind of pull in their changes. We made some small tweaks to how hashes work to make them a little bit more performant. Pushing those changes upstream is a little bit trickier because not entirely applicable to the greater mRuby world. But for the context of what we're working on, it made sense to say we're always going to interact with the symbol, and we're always going to interact with this facet of the hash data structure or the array data structure. So we'll do a custom patch in our runtime to do that. But yeah, the maintenance is there. And thankfully, it's not a conflict of maintenance So it's just we've added stuff to it. And it didn't start off at 20,000 lines. It was like, oh, this is just a really small extension. This is going to be great. We can totally do this. And here we are three years later with double the code base. But yeah, it's one of those things where you just, it builds up over time and it's valuable. Just makes, they're good changes.

 

I don't know how much longer I can wait. How do I start? Like, how do I start building my game? Right. You know, or if I sit down with my son, right. So, um, when he says he wants to be a video game developer, what he means is he wants to be Toby Fox, just being absolutely clear. I don't know if you all know who he is. Uh, he wrote, he made Undertale. Which, and,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

and it's a 2d game, right? You move your character

 

Yeah.

 

around. Right. So I'm,

 

Yep.

 

I'm sitting here thinking this is the stuff he wants to make, right? He wants to. make

 

Yep.

 

a funny, quirky story like Undertale or what's the sequel to it? Deltarune. He wants to make

 

Okay.

 

those games, right? And I'm sitting here thinking this would be fun, right? It'd also be fun to like, you know, I can see myself building a game where you have to go like navigate office politics as a developer or something. Yeah, I don't know, you know, do an Undertale that's a developer game or something. But

 

Right.

 

you know, all these things kind of come together. But how do I start? what do I

 

I

 

do

 

got it for

 

and what

 

you.

 

do I have to have in place in order to make it work?

 

You got it. So you download the zip,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

you double click to unzip it, and

 

Mm-hmm.

 

then you double click dragging Ruby EXE and you're up and running. Okay?

 

Okay, what

 

So

 

if I'm on a Mac?

 

you unzip,

 

Ha

 

you go

 

ha.

 

into the folder, double click, and you're

 

Uh

 

up and

 

huh.

 

running. Guess

 

Okay.

 

what Linux is unzip, then you have to go into the CLI and then do chmod plus x, and then you're up and running.

 

Okay.

 

But that's really it. So after

 

That's.

 

you're up and running, there's a sample app called under genre RPG underscore top down. And there are two sample apps that demonstrate how to do a top down RPG with map collision

 

Mm-hmm.

 

movement around the map. And if you enter a specific area, So it kind of shows you air quotes eventing. But I posted a link to that. And if you go to top down starting point and look at the source code, I think you'll find it really approachable.

 

So I guess, because I'm thinking like, you know, I have to put all my assets in place and I've got to do all this stuff in order to make the game work. But effectively what you're telling me is that you've already kind of given me the framework for, you know,

 

Yes.

 

if I want to do a side scroll or a what top to bottom scroll, I don't know. I don't know the lingo,

 

Yep.

 

but, you know, or a top down game, which is what we're talking about here with, you know, navigating the map, kind of like Zelda, right?

 

Exactly, yeah.

 

And so, From there, I can start to modify the map.

 

Right.

 

I can modify the interactions. I can figure out, you know, oh, they walked through a door. Now I got to do this.

 

Correct.

 

And that's all in place. So it's kind of like, I want a web app. I'm going to do Rails new,

 

Right.

 

except that, you know, it sounds like this actually gives me a little bit more because I come out with a functional framework that I don't even have to do the scaffold in order to see a page, right?

 

Right.

 

interactions.

 

Exactly. That and there's precanned sprites in there. So we've got square circles, triangles, hexagons,

 

Right.

 

and the deploy template, they're under the sprites directory. So roi gbiv. And if you want to render a square, it's just sprites forward slash square forward slash blue.png.

 

Right.

 

And then you can replace the asset later. So

 

Right.

 

those play

 

Or I can

 

that.

 

put my own assets in that are

 

Yep.

 

thischaracter.png or whatever.

 

Exactly. And that's one aspect of building games and why Ruby is so wonderful for this world is that you don't know what you're building yet. I don't know the structure of this. I don't know the types.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I don't know what properties I'm going to have. I don't know if the HP exists on the armor or if the armor is a container for slots that have material that has HP mechanisms in there. type language, the language is asking you, tell me what this looks like right now. And I think for like maybe a checking application or banking software, that world is predefined. I could see like a transfer or transaction being something that you can predefine and have work. But in this world of like artistic medium and games, Ruby feels so good because you just, you can start with dictionaries and arrays and say, I don't know what my things look like. tuples and your dictionaries. And then you start, maybe say, well, maybe I can do an open struct for this property because it's kind of getting some form and function, and then evolve to a class later. And I think

 

All right, so,

 

that's so

 

oh, go

 

beautiful.

 

ahead.

 

That's a beautiful aspect of it. So with those precanned sprites and these precanned starting points, let's you have that spark of inspiration and immediately start to experiment and see if there's something there without having the stuff up front. Yeah.

 

So that's the other question, because you keep talking about, this is so nice in Ruby. This is so nice in Ruby. And I remember way back in the day when I was trying RubyMotion. And I might have this confused with something else, but I think it was RubyMotion. The API was basically, I'm writing Objective-C Ruby style. Right?

 

Right, exactly.

 

You know, it was, I'm going to call this exact function that has a really freaking long name. You know? And it's going to do the iOS thing. Has that changed? I mean, it sounds like what you're telling me is that this is gonna look a whole lot like my Ruby and a whole lot less like Apple's Ruby.

 

Right, so that poly, so the, the mruby, the mruby layer provides us the polyfill to

 

Right.

 

basically give us, because with RubyMotion, find all, we had to extend the framework and say, patch it, redirect

 

Mm-hmm.

 

to, delegate to this, you know, objective C function. So, mruby provides us the polyfill that says, okay, if we don't have the native function to support this in our runtime, we can always fall back to the mruby function. So that transition is, that strategic, it was exactly for that reason. So we could position ourselves to slowly bring or like 1.8, I think M-Ruby's ISO standard is like 1.8. It's got ISO 1.8 standard lib. So as long as it's in there, you'll have access to it in M-Ruby. And then from there, we can slowly push down to the native level for whatever we feel needs that extra boost in performance. But yeah,

 

So what

 

your

 

you're.

 

Ruby is gonna look like Ruby.

 

So if I need an interaction from the,

 

you

 

and I guess if it's cross platform, you're not, yeah, you're not directly mapping over to Objective-C or something, but

 

Correct.

 

I guess, yeah, my question is then if I need to interact with the OS, then you've got that poly-filled for desktop for, you know, whatever, right? And so

 

Yep. Yep. So instead of using file.write.

 

I'm gonna, it's gonna be move, yeah, move underscore left instead

 

you

 

of move, object to the left

 

Right.

 

in, yeah.

 

With x, with y, with, yeah,

 

Yeah,

 

exactly.

 

uh-huh, yep, okay.

 

Yep. And so other facets of it is that, like, file.read and write, we have our own file read write APIs. We have XML parsing built in. So you don't install Nocoguri because you can't.

 

All right.

 

Because of all the external dependencies and native C extensions. So we have XML. built in with the async model, same thing with JSON. So

 

about databases.

 

all those thing, databases, no databases at this point. You can write a C extension if you want to, or bring in SQLite as your C extension

 

Okay.

 

and expose that through FFI. But file IOs there. So you

 

Okay.

 

say file.write, and then you can write your data file itself. And surprisingly, that's how a lot of game devs as far as like saving they just serialize it to JSON and then

 

Yeah.

 

you know deserialize it and pull it out.

 

As long as it's not too big, I would assume that'd be pretty fast.

 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think a darkroom, I had like the ASCII map itself had 3,600. It was a XY 3,600 thing of grid. And it persists to just extremely fast and pulls it out. So you can have pretty big game state. If you're dealing with millions of records, then yeah, I'd probably say, OK, talk with me. Let's figure

 

Yeah.

 

out what SQL solution we need to put in there. But yeah, we try to abstract all that so you don't have to worry about it.

 

device.

 

Yes.

 

So if I'm developing a game in Dragon Ruby, what is... Like if I wanted to like take advantage of the next platform version, right? Like what's that upgrade process look like? Is there a waiting period? Like how long until I can take advantage of that, right?

 

So the Indie and Pro license, which is Indie gives you C extensions and Pro gives you Oculus Quest, iOS, and Android. You just bump up the license tier and that's it. And you're done. So if you've got the mobile device and you've got your Apple Developer account or your Android device, you download the new binary. you will see the Android and iOS payloads there for you to do whatever you'd like with, and VR payloads.

 

How does the licensing work? Is it per developer, per year, per game, per?

 

Per developer, no commissions, no royalties per developer. Install it on however many systems you have.

 

and you pay once.

 

And the standard license one time, the NDN Pro are subscription-based because we have

 

Okay,

 

to keep updated. We

 

now

 

have

 

that

 

to

 

makes sense.

 

every iOS and Android release, you got to deal with it. And the thing is, is like from my perspective, there's two aspects to it. someone out financially. So like we've got in our bylaws or in our product page, we say if you can't afford the license, just email me and I'll set you up. Like it's just that simple. Now, if you're gainfully employed making, you know,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

above six figures, you will pay for this thing. Right.

 

Right.

 

It's like $7 a month for like an indie license. You're gonna pay for it. And our target price is less than a Netflix subscription. That's kind of how That's kind of how we frame it. And I've had people actually push back and say, well, can I pay when I make money? And I go, well, do you have hobbies? And they go, yeah, I do woodworking. How much have you spent on your,

 

Hahaha,

 

just your handsaws?

 

right?

 

And it's like, oh, I've got this like really cool, like $5,000, et cetera. It's like, you could buy a 60 year license with $5,000.

 

I think of what some people spend on keyboards and toward Dragon Ruby.

 

Yeah.

 

I

 

Look at that.

 

have gone broke working on keyboards. My wallet is in pain because of it. And I've never made any money off of it, but I've never said, maybe if I sell a keyboard, will I put it in there? But yeah, I think it's a phenomenal hobby to really get into, and it's so cheap. It's a wonderful medium.

 

I wanted to talk a little bit about all the sample apps and everything

 

Mm-hmm.

 

and

 

Mm-hmm.

 

maybe kind of like more of the tutorial side and like getting started with Dragon Ruby. Because way back when, when I was trying to get into game development, I came across this guy that had a site called Cartoon Smart. And basically he was an animator and he worked in Flash. And so for a while he had like just sold Flash games and you could like take all the sprites that he had make them into a different game that you wanted.

 

Right.

 

And now he's made a kind of platform, unfortunately based on Unity, where you can basically like kind of download a test app and make some tweaks to it, similar to how you can with Dragon Ruby, but it's much more like handholding, like this is kind of like a course, here are the steps at each phase. Do you have anything like that planned or are there other people kind of offering that kind of thing you can point people to?

 

Yep, so we've got the sample apps, and we've got the documentation, which is docs.dragonruby.org. All that is available locally also, so all the documentation's inside of the zip file. And used in the documentation, we actually do, we've got like a series of recommendations of how to approach it. and it's really great because Ryan does it and he doesn't have Ruby experience. So he's over there like, how the hell do I do this? And he could code circles around anyone and see, but it's great watching him use Ruby. It makes me happy that even he is productive in the environment. And so we've got school.draggonruby.org, which is your kind of like walkthrough type of tutorial. that, yeah, I'm going to make sure that is actually the URL. That is not the URL. It's in the docs. Let me go to the docs real quick. Ah, dragonruby.school. See, I knew it. And so that's your official training video. And the approach we were taking as far as the company organization is that we're worried about the engine and making sure we're going to do that one thing well. And we leave everything else to collaborations externally. So we rely heavily on the community, the Discord server, and say, if you want xyz to exist, have the power to make that exist. So Lori Olson, who's a longtime Ruby

 

I love

 

motion,

 

Lori,

 

Dragon

 

she's

 

Ruby,

 

awesome.

 

and she was like, yeah, I want to do a training video. And this stuff, I'm like, done. So she handles the training video. She's in the docs. And that's taken care of. So Valentina, this idea of the asset store, if you want to create that asset pack that I will make sure, I want to support you to make sure it happens, right? Because that's things that I don't have to do. It's like, please,

 

Yep.

 

please keep, let us do the things that we do well. And then that's one of the aspects of the community too, is that there's a lot of people that are really good with Ruby in the community, and there are a lot of newcomers. So it's beautiful to see the magic again in other people's eyes, because we've used Ruby for so long, we kind of have like lost that magic.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

just jumping on and they're like, this language is so amazing. And you get, you get a, what's it called? You get to be that thing where you get the feeling because they're having the feeling or yeah, you get to feel the magic too, because you're like, he's feeling the magic, so that makes me feel good and it makes me reminiscent of that. So the, the community is probably one of the strongest, strongest things about, about Dragon Ruby is that people just help each other. Minus one is there. We've added another one called Keefoss, which means keep it fun and stupid. So build games, don't build boring line of business applications with Dragon Ruby. Just enjoy, experiment, have fun, help each other. So it's kind of our stopgap and how we approach a lot of that stuff.

 

You get to code vicariously might be the word.

 

Yes. It's so much fun. Like, you don't have to worry about, oh, do

 

you

 

I need to create a 15-layer file structure and 50 classes to do this enterprise

 

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

 

TM thing? It's like one file, main.rb, put all your code in there, see

 

Yeah.

 

if it feels good, and then evolve and expand from there. But it's a really intoxicating experience, and it feels good. It feels really good.

 

I will say opening up that Flappy Dragon example, it was surprising how small it was and so easy to read. So huge kudos to you there.

 

Yeah, I don't have time.

 

Ha!

 

I don't have the dev hours to build. I got to build quickly.

 

So

 

I

 

my

 

got to build

 

one

 

lots of

 

huge

 

games quickly.

 

follow-up

 

Mm-hmm.

 

here is like... It would be great to have like some kind of

 

you

 

editor, right? Or like UI, like almost flash-esque of the, you know,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

the old days. Are there any like plans for that? Or are you focusing specifically on the game engine? Are you hoping that kind of the community evolves this kind of overall

 

So

 

environment?

 

here's the pro tip. You will outgrow any editor that's baked into a game engine. So this is that same Twitch thing. Go to Twitch and watch people use the scene editor in Unity. And then while they're coming, ask them, why didn't you put that one thing in the scene editor and why are you doing it programmatically now? Oh, because the scene editor doesn't allow for this dynamic emitter to exist, and it's too hard to get the node IRK. So I have to do that part programmatically. And so you outgrow whatever editor that ships with your game engine as the IDE. So what we do instead is we have a heads-up display. So if you bring up the Flappy Dragon game and press tilde, it brings down the Quake console. it brings down a Quake console and you can invoke Ruby right there inside

 

Wow,

 

of that

 

that

 

thing.

 

is so cool.

 

Ha ha!

 

I

 

and

 

have it open now. That's awesome.

 

And type 1 plus 2, and it'll say 3. It's the greatest thing. And so you have introspection into your entire game state from that console. And on top of that, you can invoke any function. So you're like, oh, I need to spawn an enemy over here. Well, you just type it in and spawn the enemy. And the thing is that the console itself is written in Dragon Ruby, and it's open source under MIT license. So you can extend your console to be

 

Oh nice.

 

exactly what you want it to be. And the thing is that because it uses all the same concepts that are in the game engine, you're not mentally shifting. Like the Unity scene editor, you have to now go into the IDE extension world, but that's not the case for us. So you've got that entry point with the heads up display to quickly put functions in and do all that cool stuff. And then you've got the source code as a reference implementation. And then on top of that, we've got sample apps how to create stage editors. So you go into god mode, and it changes the idea to where you can put your collision maps and all that good stuff in there. And then that persists immediately to disk live, and you keep playing your game. So we try to position you to never, as your game gets more complex, we don't want you to go slower. Because when you go slower, then you And we want your engine or your game to grow with the IDE tools themselves. And historically, you always see some successful platformer do all those cool things, and then they add the stage editor after the fact. And it's like, why did you do that? Why is the stage editor coming at the end, as opposed to hand-in-hand with the creation of your game? reposition things.

 

So I've got a quick question, and this

 

Yep.

 

may be stupid, but are you able to modify the game as you're playing it on a regular device?

 

Yes. Yes, it hot loads

 

If

 

to iOS.

 

I allow, yeah, oh

 

Haha

 

my gosh, that's so cool. I

 

We

 

just

 

heart

 

say

 

load.

 

that because there are so many apps, right? I've seen a whole new set of games come out recently where they're

 

Thank

 

very

 

you.

 

hacker-esque, they call them, right? That allow you to

 

Yep.

 

kind of code in the game,

 

Yep.

 

walk the character walks up to a computer, opens up a console and they can have like, they could try and do stuff like a regular terminal, right?

 

Yeah,

 

That's so cool. Like I can

 

we

 

totally

 

hard load

 

imagine,

 

to devices.

 

totally imagine a game where you can make the game by playing the game.

 

Yeah, so one of the community members actually made an editor using the editor that they were building. So they got it to a point where it was functional, where they could type and move arrow keys around. And then they loaded the source code for the editor and started editing it with the... Yeah, it was... Yes, we've had shaking of heads, but it was great.

 

hahahaha

 

That is so funny.

 

But you can disable the console, right? When you release

 

Nope.

 

the game.

 

Well, you can if you want. But as an indie, your lifeblood is people being able to mod your game. That is

 

Oh,

 

your lifeblood.

 

fair.

 

Ah.

 

Yep. That

 

And

 

is

 

Quake

 

so true.

 

3, Quake 3 doesn't has a console. Borderlands has a console. Into the Breach on the Nintendo Switch exposes a console. So this heads up display, this console, Let them hack. Let them explore. Let them

 

I, yeah, I guess I don't

 

build

 

care

 

out your

 

if

 

game.

 

they

 

Yeah.

 

quote unquote cheat.

 

Yeah,

 

Yeah. Who cares?

 

it's their game. Who cares? Yep. And it's a beautiful thing. And that's how you build that community around your game and give it that longevity. Because people will, yeah, they'll just create mods. And you just say, here, do it. Explore, grow, make fun things,

 

That's awesome.

 

make stupid things. Yeah. It's a different mindset because I originally thought that too. It's like, oh, you can disable it if you want, but I'd recommend don't do it. Just put the thing out there and let other people enjoy that thing that you built. It's a good feeling.

 

So I noticed on the Dragon Ruby site you have this Discord server, which I actually, you know, when I went in to try these games out, joined, and it's very active, it's great. Where do you suggest people go for tutorials like diving in outside of the Discord? Is there other sites they should track to follow updates

 

I was just

 

and stuff?

 

about to ask the same question. My version of this is, is there a book? Because I'm old, I'm going gray, I like to have a map in the afternoons. Is there a book? I remember there was a Rebemotion book, which I bought,

 

Yeah.

 

the Play Also book. Is there a Dragon Ruby book for us old timers?

 

There is there isn't a book because you haven't written it yet.

 

DAAA

 

Ha ha ha ha ha!

 

So there's something called, there's a Pico, Pico-8, have you heard of that fantasy console? So there's something called a Picozine, and it did phenomenally well. So if you type in like Pico-Zine, and it's this like digital book that someone wrote about Pico-8. And the format, it alludes to like a wise poignant, I can never

 

No

 

say that word.

 

poignant.

 

Guide, Wise Guide, yeah, Poignant,

 

Yeah.

 

there we go. I always try to pronounce the G. Wise Poignant Guide to Ruby, but the Picozine has this retro aspect where you get those coding magazines, and you take them, and you write the code themselves. But I would love for someone to create a Dragon Ruby zine and then promote that, elevate you, so you've got some new stuff coming to you, you know, help inspire other people. But

 

This

 

aside

 

is how

 

from

 

I learned

 

that,

 

to code

 

yep.

 

in the 80s, was the typing in games and then modeling them. So this

 

Yeah.

 

is very close

 

And I think

 

to

 

it's

 

my

 

endearing.

 

heart. I'm not sure I can.

 

Yeah. And as far as the docs, you've got docs.dragonrooiby.org. For the sample apps, what I usually recommend is just do the sample apps in order, because they're ordered by easiest to most complex. So if you like just reading API docs, they're available there. You've got the heads-up display to do whatever class.methods, and you've got all that introspection built in. go through the sample apps and kind of one-on-one do that or dragonruby.school

 

So what

 

Bye-Yah.

 

is the best game? What is the best game? I don't mean your favorite, I mean the best.

 

The best Dragon Ruby game?

 

Best Dragonery game? What's the best one?

 

And I can't say any of my own, right?

 

Well, no, you can. I mean, you can.

 

Okay.

 

I mean, I'm not dark and something very

 

So

 

popular.

 

it's like, wow, I can't say no. As far as most successful games, I have the most successful games on Dragon Ruby. I'm probably

 

Right?

 

the most successful Ruby game developer in the entire world, because I'm probably the only one. But aside from that, there's a lot of on the website, dragonruby.org, if you go to the showcase, there's a lot of games on there that are made with Dragon Ruby that are available on itch and you're putting me on the spot because I know the game, I know like the playing of the game and I can't remember the name of it. But it was actually built during, for a game jam. So someone put it together for the boss battle game jam. And that game is pretty fantastic. And it was some of the community members that put that together. But I'll share the link to that specific game itself. But the art was good, the controls were beautiful. Music is great. It's just a really great game.

 

Cool. So what is itch.io? I just have to ask.

 

So itch.io is kind of your, you know how you do mixtapes or like SoundCloud, it's kind of like

 

Uh-huh.

 

your mixtape SoundCloud for video games. So

 

Okay.

 

it makes it trivial to upload your games on there. You can monetize them. We actually sell the standard license on itch itself to just be part of that community and to get the organic visibility there. Steam requires you to do a lot of things to get a single game out there. Itch removes all that. It's like, put the game out, sell

 

Okay.

 

it, give us a cut if you want. You can set how much money you give back to them. And it's a really nice, it's a really great model. But yeah, it's kind of like Steam, but for that indie world.

 

Was it Decaf Dungeon?

 

Is it? I don't think it's Decaf Dungeon, but that does sound like a game that someone would make with Dragon Ruby. But there's so many games on there. Oh, Duelist, that was it. That's the name of the game. So Duelist came out of a boss battle game jam. And basically, the idea of the game jam is that you create a boss, and you have to beat that boss. And they just did a phenomenal job with it. For that game jam, I created Broad Sword of Justice. So that's another playable, ridiculous title that you can play. But yeah, that would be my game pick.

 

Very cool. All right, well, yeah, let's get to picks, because, yeah, I have other

 

It is

 

things

 

time.

 

to do today. Yeah. Valentino,

 

you

 

what are your picks?

 

I just got a new Apple Watch, the Ultra, and

 

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

 

I'm just loving it.

 

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

 

I love the... my

 

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

 

old watch didn't have an always on display,

 

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

 

and so like so annoying to just look down and then have to raise your arm, which I know

 

Mm.

 

that you know some of the semi-newer ones already had this, but it's just so great to just be able to look down and like know what direction

 

Yeah, raising

 

Back

 

your

 

in the

 

arm,

 

90s,

 

that's

 

they

 

rough.

 

had something like that.

 

Yeah. Ha ha ha.

 

Didn't the 90s have always-on watches? I vaguely remember

 

I mean,

 

that.

 

I don't know. Mine were always those like Cassia ones that were digital. So like if the sun hit it the wrong way, you had

 

Yeah,

 

to

 

you

 

raise

 

never,

 

it

 

you

 

up

 

couldn't

 

anyway.

 

see it

 

So,

 

yet.

 

Yeah.

 

so I guess like in a way I have the same watch.

 

Hehehe

 

I had had the same watch.

 

Thanks for watching!

 

Nice.

 

That's it for me.

 

Okay, Luke, what are your picks?

 

I was gonna pick UTM for Mac last week. I got one of the new ARM-based Mac laptops and I couldn't get any of my stuff to run until I installed UTM, stands for Universal Touring Machine. It's completely changed the way

 

you

 

I use the machine. So UTM is free, it's based on the Queenie backend. And given what we've been talking about, I would like to pick a couple of things which is just amazing for hardware hacking. He's got a video on his new

 

I'm not sure if you can hear me.

 

hackable mechanical

 

I'm not sure if you can hear me.

 

keyboard called the Myrage

 

I'm not sure if you can hear me.

 

3

 

I'm not sure if you can hear me.

 

and another video on his

 

I'm not sure if you can hear me.

 

head mounted display.

 

I'm not sure if you can hear me.

 

Speaking of a HUD, this is a real-life

 

I'm not sure if you can hear me.

 

head mounted

 

I'm not sure if you can hear me.

 

display based on an Epson pair of kind of smart video glasses. So those are my picks for this week.

 

Awesome. I'm gonna throw out a few picks. Now I've been traveling so I haven't been playing a whole bunch of board games So I think I'm just gonna repick one that my wife and I played last night We do a date every week and We decided to just play board games for our date this week. So we played King of Tokyo if you've played that it's pretty simple.

 

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

 

I I'll admit I destroyed her

 

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

 

both times. We played it and then we played legendary Marvel legendary

 

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

 

So just to kind of

 

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

 

give a little bit of background on these games.

 

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

 

King of Tokyo

 

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

 

is a dice game. You roll the dice if you attack the person. If you hit the person in Tokyo, they can leave Tokyo and you go into Tokyo. You can't heal when you're in Tokyo. You can get cards to give you special abilities. And anyway, it's a ton of fun. Let me pull up Board Game Geek real quick so I can tell you the weight on that one. It's a game that I can play with my kids, so it's not that involved. There is a sequel to it, this King of New York, and I didn't like it as much. King of Tokyo has a weight of 1.49. It says it's 30 minutes playing time. Yeah, the first game I beat her in like 10 minutes. And it was just, you know, sometimes it's just the way it goes with your roles and the way you get things going. But yeah, so Marvel Legendary is, it's a card game. And it comes with a game board so you can place the cards on it where it goes. It's a deck building game though. And we have a whole bunch of expansions for it. It's a lot of fun too. It's weight on board game geek is 2.43. And yeah, so we just, that randomly chooses cards from the expansions that you select. So, you know, and then it says, so it says, here's the mastermind you're fighting, here's the scheme you're trying to overcome. You tell it how many players, you tell it which expansions you wanna pull heroes from and masterminds from. And then, yeah, it does what we found because we used to like turn them all on, right? And so you get like this weird mix of heroes. What we found is that the different expansions are made to work together in a lot of ways and so Kind of the magic mix is about two expansions because you get five heroes or six heroes depending on how many How many people are playing but it's it's a lot of fun some of the masterminds are really freaking hard and some of them aren't But you kind of get a feel for how that works and it's it's it's a fun fun fun game So I'm gonna pick those Um, and then I'm starting a new podcast, uh, about careers. It's actually called command your coding career. Um, and the reason is, is because, uh, I, I opened up a while back an opportunity for people to come to me for coaching where I would just help them with what I mean, technical stuff, career stuff. And I had people coming to me over and over and over and over again, basically saying, how do I get to the next stage of my career, right? Whether they're juniors and trying to become seniors. I had a number of seniors who were basically coming to me and saying, I want to start podcasting because the next stage of my career seems to be helping people or making a difference this way, that way, or the other way. A few people wanted to start a podcast or something else so that they could sell courses and stuff like that, which is a place I'm going to now. So I started this podcast and I'm just going to answer a lot of the questions that I've been getting on these calls. So it's, hey, I'm struggling with this at work. I'll just talk through it. Probably tell a few stories from my past, my background, but one thing that came out of it was that I'm also putting together freebies and helps for people. And so by the time this goes out, you'll be able to get this. I was working on it right before the show and I should have it up here within an hour or so. But if you go to topendevs.com slash resume, I'm starting off with resume stuff I've had a lot of people just, I'm not getting interviews. And then I look at their resume and I'm like, well, your, your resume isn't formatted in a way that helps the employer know that they want you. So, um, you can get my resume. Um, and I think it actually has my email address on it. I took my cell phone number off it, sorry. Um, but you can get, uh, you can get it at topendevs.com slash resume and it will, you just enter your email address and then you'll get a copy of it. straightforward how that all works. But what I'm hoping to do is, you know, then I can help people with cover letters, or maybe I can help people with, I keep going to interviews and it's not working right. And so maybe I'll put together some videos of mock interviews or things like that. Right. And so I really do want to help people through this. I've also been working in a contract and I'm looking for ways to kind of reduce my dependency on but I'm going to give a ton of crap away for free because I just, I feel like there's a lot of people out there that need help and I don't necessarily want you to have to pay to get what you need, but I also have to make a living. And so however I wind up splitting the differences kind of the way that'll go. But yeah, for now, if you want the resume, go to topendevs.com slash resume. And then the last thing I'm going to throw out there is Rails, a remote conference, putting that together, it's going to be in February. So if you want to submit a talk, submit a talk. buy a ticket, you can buy a ticket. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to some of the interactions there. I'm pretty heavily committed to not just doing like a series of videos. What I want is I want kind of a place where people can go and interact. So I've been looking at a couple of platforms that effectively let you walk around the expo floor slash interaction area. And if you get close to a group of people talking, you can join it and, you know, join in, you know, put together there's some birds of a feather. I mean, you know, that for me is the magic of going to a conference. And so if I can replicate some of that in the meantime, you know, that's something that I wanna do. And I have other plans, but I think that's kind of the, the next big lift for what we're doing is, yeah, putting that out and helping folks out. And then, yeah, that's pretty much all of my picks. Amir, what are your picks?

 

All right, so my picks are actually all book related. They're all books that I've listened to, just eat up audible all the time.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So the first one is Project Hail Mary. It's

 

Oh, that was so good.

 

so good, good, good.

 

Yeah.

 

Very good.

 

Yeah.

 

It's a great read. The Martian sub-pick

 

Yep.

 

is by the same guy that did The Martian. Another great book is We Are Legion, We Are Bob. And it's a three, four book series. And it's about a software dev who sells his company and then signs up to be cryogenically frozen in the event of death so that he can be brought back and live for him immortally. And signs up, immediately gets hit by a car and killed, and wakes up 150 years later to be commissioned to as a von Neumann probe that goes into space and expands out.

 

Oh,

 

It

 

interesting.

 

is hilarious. It's a funny book. It's ridiculous. And it's got a kind of like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe in some places, just the humor in there. And so that's a good book. And then it's four books series. And then the final pick that I have is three. It's a three book series called the broken earth. So the first book in that series is called The Fifth Season. And it's more of a fantasy book and it kind of explores like this post-apocalyptic world where like the entire earth has been brought back into kind of like Pangaea, the Pangaea continent,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

and kind of talks about, I don't want to give any spoilers, but it talks about what went down and how they're And there's this like, the fifth season is the season that occasionally comes where there's a ton of like volcanic eruptions and it covers the cloud and soot and then people have to like survive with store caches and everything's in disarray. And, yeah. And so they, it's a three book series that goes into the exploration of how all that gets fixed. It's a very sad book. It's like a very like, bittersweet, you know,

 

Mm.

 

serious, serious book. Those are my three book picks.

 

Awesome. Yeah, I really loved Hail Mary. I didn't pick it up for a long time because I listened to The Martian, I really enjoyed it. And then I picked up Artemis and I didn't like that book

 

I did

 

at all.

 

not like Artemis either. It was okay, but yeah.

 

Yeah. But

 

Hail

 

I

 

Mary was great.

 

was looking for a sci-fi book and I was like, I'll give it a shot. And I really enjoyed it.

 

We are Legion. We are Legion. We

 

Oh.

 

are Bob. You will absolutely love it.

 

I'll have to check it out. All right, cool. People want to connect with you online or if you have any other last minute kind of, here's where I kind of live online. Where

 

I'm on

 

do

 

Twitter.

 

people go?

 

I'm on Twitter. You can find me on the Discord server for DragonRuby, discord.dragonruby.org, and email ar at amirrajohn.net. So

 

All right.

 

all things are open.

 

Sounds good. All right, well, thanks

 

Thank you.

 

for coming. This was awesome. I seriously, I'm just like, I have stuff I got to work on, but I might just not sleep so I can write games.

 

Just play. Just

 

Yeah.

 

open it up, double click, and

 

Yeah.

 

try something. And just get that magic

 

Yep.

 

back. Feel happy again.

 

Yeah.

 

No more enterprise coding. I'm not allowing you to do that after hours anymore.

 

Okay. All right.

 

You're like, done.

 

Yeah.