Metadata Explained

When you define values in metadata/game_metadata.txt, it may not be immediately apparent of what the base values are for.

  • devid is your itch.io username, useful when combined with dragonruby-publish
  • gameid is the slug of your game on itch.io, a.k.a. the URL path it’s accessible at, also useful with dragonruby-publish

The rest of the values are pretty self-explanatory.

Accessing Metadata

When you define values in files in the metadata/ directory of your source, you can access them within your game using args.cvars. That returns a hash of all of the values that are set, which you can then access. So to get the version set of your game, you’d do this:

args.cvars['game_metadata.version'].value

An example usage of this would be for when creating save data, you could specify which version of the game was used so that if you change the data structure and need to migrate it across releases, you’d have that data accessible.