Rachael Wright-Munn (ChaelCodes) joins to talk everything from coding games to RubyConf to App Store policies.

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Teasers

[Chael rants for 5 minutes about all of the programming games you should try]

Joel: I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna experiment with this.

Collin: Have you ever thought of making games?

Rachael: Yeah. I have made one game before with Amir Rajan on his, like, Dragon Ruby thing. Um, it was called Sadistic Self Care Survival, um, Simulator. And the idea was that if you did not take care of your body, you would just die. So, like, you’re sitting there at your desk, you have to make sure that your water meter stays full, and your, like, snack meter stays full, and you have to, like, go to the bathroom, and you have to do this, like, on a very regular cadence, or you die.

Joel: Your snack meter?

Collin: I’d be fucked. Um, I’ve had a cup of yogurt today and two coffees. Um, what was I going to ask you? Oh, what was your experience with Dragon Ruby? Um, because here, here was, here was my experiences that I didn’t play with it very much because one, it seemed like, it seemed like it’s not a framework. It’s something that I need to build a framework on top of to make my game. Um, it’s more like it has all the pieces there, uh, which, I don’t know, I wanted to be guided a little bit more, if that makes sense. And two was that it, um, I don’t know, it didn’t feel very Ruby like to me, like it relies on a lot of like global state and things like that. I don’t know. What was your experience?

Rachael: I had a little bit of a cheat code, which was that Amir helped me build the game. So that, you know, like, my experience with it was that I had a very guided, like, experience learning it. Um, I really liked how responsive it was. Like, he showed me a bunch of tricks, like, how to modify the values so you could just, like, move the mouse and, like, see everything change in the game. And, like, look at some really, like, nifty tricks that it can handle because it’s literally, you change the Ruby code and you immediately see the changes. in the game, right? And so for me, that part was really cool. Um, it definitely still felt like Ruby to me, but also, like, we got into a couple of little, uh, arguments about whether to add classes or not. Um, so that might be part of it, is just, like, how you’re writing it. I kind of see what you mean about the framework. Um, I wonder if you might have had a better time going through, like, the tutorials at the bottom? Did you, like, check those out?

Collin: No, of course I didn’t. Immediately no. Why would I do that?

Rachael: Okay,

Collin: I just like to, I just like to,

Rachael: So a lot of the-

Collin: I try things, fail, and then complain about them on my podcast.

Rachael: There are a bunch of little tutorial games that are like inside of the, um, the version of it that you download. I will say it’s, it’s a weird experience kind of downloading everything, unzipping it, and that’s like your environment. All of your tools and all of the tutorials and documentation and the sample games and all that sort of stuff, and you’re building off of that, that felt a little bit odd to me. Like I think it would’ve felt more natural if it was like, you import this thing and this thing does the thing.

Collin: So when you distribute that, is it mRuby? Is that what it uses? Cause you need to bundle your Ruby with it ideally, right? So you can just give somebody your game.

Joel: I think it uses Dragon Ruby, I think.

Collin: I mean, they don’t have their own interpreter though-

Rachael: Yes.

Collin: I think it uses mRuby. Do they?

Joel: I think it’s a fork of MRuby or something.

Collin: That makes sense.

Rachael: I feel really bad because I brought him on a podcast and I asked him these questions, and I do not remember the answers. But Joel is absolutely right, it’s a, it’s a custom little Ruby interpreter thing.

Collin: We may have told you this before. Did you know that mRuby is Matz’s Ruby and then CRuby’s Collin’s Ruby and then JRuby is Joel’s Ruby.

Rachael: I was there for that conversation, yes, that was at the Rooftop Ruby party.

Collin: Yeah, you were there. So we can get a third party review so that way somebody will want to give us money to do this again, because they’ll hear about how great it is.

Rachael: It was absolutely fabulous, I think it was, like, the best party that I went to there, like, everybody was hanging out and chatting around the fire pits and having a great time and there were, like, plenty of drinks and, like, everybody was super nice and friendly and it was just a really awesome party all around.

Collin: Yeah. And you’re definitely going to use Honey Badger and Sidekick and our other, and EchoBind and Flagrant now, right? Because, of course, you learned about our sponsors.

Rachael: Oh man, HoneyBadger is so absolutely amazing and I 100% heard about them for the first time ever at the Rooftop Ruby Podcast.

Listen

Check out the full podcast at Rooftop Ruby!

Transcript

The full transcript is available at Rooftop Ruby!