DragonRuby's Seventh Year - Where We Started and Where We're Going

April 19th 2026 marks the seven year anniversary of DragonRuby Game Toolkit. In celebration of this milestone, the game engine will be free for the next few days. Enjoy.

Why was DragonRuby created?

In short? I didn’t want to be miserable building video games.

True support and guidance for cross-platform development and distribution.

A number of games I released ended up doing well commercially, and I found myself in a tough spot releasing to all platforms (mobile, Steam, and console). I was wasting so much time chasing down platform specific issues. I was tired of porting/re-writing parts of my games so that it would play well “everywhere”. I want to make new games, not spend my life porting games I’ve already created.

I felt like I was doing something wrong, and that this was a solved problem that I just wasn’t aware of. Turns out that no engine out there addresses these challenges. It’s not enough for an engine to provide a cross-platform executable, it needs way more. To list a few things:

• Unification of input/output (touch, gamepad, keyboard mouse).
• Provide facilities for rendering landscape and portrait.
• Handle scaling across all aspect ratios w/o skewing and distortion.
• Provide a means to render edge-to-edge (ultra-wide displays, deal with notches and bezels, ensure no input is covered or obscured).
• Automatically handle texture scaling from 720p all the way up to 6K.
• Remove the pain of distribution (iOS, Android, Web, PC, Mac, Linux via Itch and Steam, and of course Console).

What was available in 2019 half-heartedly addressed thees concerns. And what’s worse, these engines convinced us that this wasn’t their responsibility to take care of.

Facilities that support the full life of a game, from inception to distribution.

It’s impossible to describe how it feels when you get a spark of inspiration. You want to start working on this idea immediately and I was tired of the boilerplate needed to prototype a new idea.

• I wanted an environment that doesn’t suffer from upfront boilerplate code, but also doesn’t limit me from building out a well architected solution.
• An environment that makes it trivial to participate in a Game Jam to vet an idea, and then walk away with code that I can continue building on, as opposed to throwing away.
• I wanted hot-loading where changes I make are immediately seen on the screen without having to recompile and restart a game loop. Game state had to be retained, even across runtime exceptions.
• I wanted an environment that has testing and regression support built in so that I’m not spending hours play testing my game before every new update.

Stability, community, and evergreen, real-world references.

I didn’t want to be afraid to update to the latest version of an engine.

I was tired of looking for resources online, only to find out that a particular sample was out of date and wouldn’t even start up.

I was tired of “awesome out of the box features” that ended up being half-baked/demo-ware.

And I wanted to be part of a community that cared about each other and welcomed game devs of all skill sets.

What has DragonRuby was done so far?

It’s been seven years, and the things I wanted to accomplish have solidified over this time:

• Cross-platform distribution is painless (demo).
• Games built with DragonRuby look and run exactly the same, regardless of platform, device, chipset architecture, or OS.
• We’ve had 255 releases across the 7 years. DR had one, solitary breaking change in 2021 (with clear instructions on how to fix it).
• The engine now has 217 sample apps/reference implementations. Every single one of these samples runs and remains up to date with every release. This doesn’t even include the open source projects that community members actively maintain.
• The Discord community has over 2000 members. It’s one of the kindest, most helpful communities you’ll ever be a part of. The engine itself surpassed 100K downloads last year.
• Over 400+ games have been released to Itch.io. DragonRuby is also ranked as one of the top rated / most popular engines.
• The environment is hot-loaded, with a built-in replay system, “Quake Console”, and unit testing infrastructure.
• Rendering benchmarks are 20K sprites at 60fps (demo).
• Many-to-many collision benchmarks are 7k entities at 60fps (demo).
• Binary size has remained under 10MB.

What’s next?

The SDL3 upgrade of DragonRuby is near completion. With the upgrade, DR will get:

• True cross-platform, post effect shaders (which will look the same everywhere with a single code-base).
• The ability to render raw geometries.
• Fine-grained control of textures via affine transforms.
• Improved HD support and font scaling (specifically Windows).
• Pixel perfect rendering provided directly by SDL3.
• And more.

Here is a full list of SDL3 features we’ll have access to: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/NewFeatures

And of course. No. Breaking. Changes.

Happiness is what matters.

DragonRuby is a breath of fresh air. It’s happiness. I don’t know how else to say it. Grab your free license, and join the Discord server. Start building your dream game using an engine that actually gives a shit about indie game devs.