Bevy Engine
bevyengine.org
Bevy is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open-source forever!

Bevy is a fun, cozy game engine to play with if you’re looking for something very flexible that implements some surprisingly advanced features. things I like:

  • it’s all rust, which is an advantage for me and the chemical burns I have from handling the dialect of C++ a lot of older game engines used to be written in
  • it implements a flexible entity component system, which I found pretty great for specifying game and rendering logic for things like roguelikes and simulations, where multiple game systems might interact in dynamic ways
  • the API is very cozy and feels like querying an extremely fast database at times
  • it’s a lot lower level than something like Unity or Godot, but you get some pretty advanced rendering features included
  • the main developer seems to have a lot of industry experience and a solid roadmap
  • bobtreehugger@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Bevy makes sense for my programming-damaged brain. I’m definitely not a gamedev, but I’ve been pretty productive when playing around with it. I’d also call out that it already has an ecosystem of plugins, with things like physics and tile engines, and you can use cargo, which is way better than using some weird storefront to get plugins.

    • self@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      you can use cargo, which is way better than using some weird storefront to get plugins.

      absolutely! not to mention the pre-storefront dependency situation (just throw ‘em in a directory and hack on them til they work)

      I’d also call out that it already has an ecosystem of plugins, with things like physics and tile engines

      that makes me want to try starting another Bevy project! last time I tried, the plugin ecosystem was only getting started. I just wish I had better game ideas

    • self@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      it was quite fast last time I used it, but that was a few major versions ago and I wasn’t exactly pushing any limits in terms of complexity

      generally speaking, raw ECS performance is never much of a bottleneck for most games. rendering is definitely a much bigger deal, but the remaining poster in that Reddit thread was too busy being toxic to make much of a coherent point in that direction

      I’d definitely love to see a non-synthetic comparison between Bevy, Unity ECS, Godot, and other engines — that is, something roughly game-shaped implemented in all of them, with impressions on the tradeoff between developer ergonomics, flexibility, and performance that comes with using each engine. if nothing like this exists right now, it might actually be a fun project to start in lieu of a game idea