Ruby on Rails is a Game Engine
Jonathan Woodard • Boulder, CO • Talk

Date: October 06, 2025
Published: not published
Announced: unknown

Developing a turn-based web MMO using Ruby on Rails has led me through some outrageous corners of the framework's capabilities, plus required building a few fun hacks and some HTML tricks I've never seen anywhere else.

My game, Galactic Impact (https://www.galacticimpact.com), is styled on 90s "Space Empire 4X" games: "Master of Orion", "Pax Imperia", and their ilk. It invites Users to command a fleet of ships across a two-dimensional map of stars to explore, populate, and develop worlds, while engaging in diplomacy or hostilities with other players.

To power "game-like" user experience expectations, here are a few places I've left the beaten path of standard CRUD Apps, where Rails has cheerfully followed: extensive use of dynamic SVG, YAML serialization for combat reports, Sidekiq batching for game-turn resolution, a blend of integer and UUID PKs, turbo-streams for snappy UI, PostGIS for geometry-based queries, and many more tricks.

In this talk, we'll take a journey exploring how a series of game-oriented "Product Needs" led to each "Unexpected, but still Railsy, solution". Hopefully you'll leave with a newfound appreciation for Rails' flexibility, and if you've ever been interested in developing games, maybe it will inspire you to build with the tools you already know.

Rocky Mountain Ruby 2025