Runa

I started building Runa for a simple reason: I wanted to play RPG Maker games on my iPhone and couldn't find an app that did it well. What was on the App Store at the time either only supported MV/MZ, had a rough UI, or had been abandoned years ago. I play a lot of indie games from itch.io — most of them RPG Maker — and having to sit at a computer every time I wanted to play was genuinely annoying. So I built it myself.

The first thing I learned was that iOS is not friendly to this kind of app. Strict sandboxing, no arbitrary file access, no dynamic code execution at runtime, and you're forced to use Apple's rendering engine. I thought I understood those constraints before I started. I didn't, really.

MV and MZ export to HTML5 — in theory they're just websites, drop them into a WKWebView and you're done. The proof of concept ran in ten minutes. Then I spent weeks getting the first stable game working. WKWebView blocks the cross-origin resource loading these games depend on. localStorage saves can be wiped by iOS under memory pressure. Audio won't play without a user gesture. Some plugins use APIs WKWebView doesn't have. Each problem was small on its own — they added up.

The part that cost the most time wasn't getting games to run — it was getting them to run consistently. MV has been around since 2015 and has a huge plugin ecosystem. Any game on itch.io might have 20–30 third-party plugins of varying quality. Some use deprecated APIs. Some leak memory continuously — on iOS that means a silent OOM kill. Some assume Chrome desktop timing that doesn't match WebKit. I had to test each case, identify common failures, and surface meaningful errors instead of leaving users with a black screen.

XP, VX, and VX Ace were a completely different problem — they're not web games. They're Ruby applications compiled against a proprietary Windows runtime. I spent months researching before finding mkxp-z: an open-source re-implementation of the RPG Maker runtime that compiles to native code. Integrating mkxp-z into an iOS app, managing the Ruby VM lifecycle, bridging the filesystem, handling RTP dependencies in a way users could understand — that was most of the development time for these three engines.

Runa ships with all five engines supported. Most games run stably. The ones that don't are almost always due to plugins that assume a desktop browser or Windows APIs — Runa surfaces a clear error rather than hanging silently. Save files for XP, VX, and VX Ace are binary-compatible with the PC originals, so you can continue a Windows save on iPhone or the other way around. This project took longer than I expected and was harder than I thought — but in the end I have what I wanted from the start: an app to play RPG Maker games on iPhone, properly. If you run into any bugs while using it, feel free to reach out and report them by email — I'll do my best to fix things as quickly as I can.

Once the RPG Maker system is solid, my next goal is to add support for Ren'Py games. If you'd like to see that happen sooner, every download and piece of feedback keeps me going.