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I see a lot of work being done on rust game engines / ecs crates / frameworks etc but I don’t think I’ve heard about an actual successful game launched based on

by eknkc 2y ago

I see a lot of work being done on rust game engines / ecs crates / frameworks etc but I don’t think I’ve heard about an actual successful game launched based on the rust game dev ecosystem. Are there any good examples? Don’t get me wrong, bevy looks fantastic but I feel like rust is not the best language for game development. It is hard to do fast paced prototyping using rust. It is hard to do shitty things you might need to do like juggling memory in a definitely unsafe way. And it also looks like ECS is not a nice to have but a must have in rust game dev. Borrow checker will not be your friend otherwise. I might be completely wrong though. Also, I’m not a game dev, just interested in the concepts around it. Anyone successfully developing a game (that is not a basic space shooter) in rust?

danr4 2y ago
BitCraft is rust-ish
baq 2y ago
If you’re expecting triple A titles from rust, that isn’t happening anytime soon. That said, the article lists quite a few examples of real games released on popular distribution platforms and with good reviews.
Ygg2 2y ago
What games Godot had at year 4? There is Tiny Glade for Bevy engine but not renderer. For Rust itself, I think Veloren was somewhat successful but it's in dev.
- daghamm 2y ago
  Godot was often #1 or #2 choice in game jams then. Hence even without AAA titles and console support it had a huge amount of developers testing it and improving it. I don't see the same thing happening with bevy. In fact, I see very few game developers using Rust. It's almost like fighting the borrow checker sucks the energy out of the creative process. (My current side project is in Rust)
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    > Godot was often #1 or #2 choice in game jams then. The major difference is that Godot is designed around an editor. That makes the on-ramp significantly easier (especially for folks coming to Godot from Unity or Unreal). Bevy is, in this context, more of a framework than an "engine" in the modern sense. There isn't yet a Rust-based equivalent to Unity/Unreal
    - runevault 2y ago
      Worth noting Bevy is trying to figure out their own editor which is intended to be built in Bevy, same way Godot's Editor is a Godot application. Until that happens only a more hardcore audience is likely to use the engine I agree. I know I'm waiting for both being closer to 1.0 and the editor before I take a serious dive into Bevy.
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    Parent asked for games. I queried about same level of quality games when Godot was just as old (around 2018 it was 4 years old). Comparing game to game jam, is like comparing a house to Lego house models. Apples and oranges. > I don't see the same thing happening with bevy. I don't see eye to eye then. Make a good UI, slap some lua via wasm and you'd get similar work environment to Godot.
KronisLV 2y ago
> I see a lot of work being done on rust game engines / ecs crates / frameworks etc but I don’t think I’ve heard about an actual successful game launched based on the rust game dev ecosystem I’m pretty sure that you could say the same even about engines like Godot - they get a lot of hype but the adoption is somewhat slow and given that the majority of game projects go nowhere (at least in regards to indie developers), it might take a while until there’s a substantial base of released successful games, for any engine. I say, give it a decade.
- runevault 2y ago
  Godot has a few different successful games made with it. Cruelty Squad and Brotato coming to mind. Also Buckshot roulette which was made in Godot 3 though I think I heard they updated it to 4 at some point (which likely took some work as the syntax of gdscript changed).
  - daghamm 2y ago
    The impression I get from r/gamedev is that since the Unity screw up one third or maybe even half of the indie developers have switched to godot. Godot is extremly easy to work with. It does not have all the bells and whistles of Unity or Unreal, but in turn is very small, simple and stable.
    - runevault 2y ago
      Just having less painful compile times at the start of projects is so nice. When I was using Unity even simplistic projects felt like they took forever. Even dotnet godot projects get running faster on average in my experience. Though sadly current c# godot projects cannot export to web. And even though projects can certainly slow down as they get bigger, at least getting bootstrapped is less painful (I haven't built anything of significant size, biggest thing was a jam game with one moderately sized level that loaded up pretty fast but I also cheated with a single bit of geometry for the level).
    - paavohtl 2y ago
      Most people posting to /r/gamedev have never shipped a game or even seriously attempted to (neither have I, to be clear). It's largely a forum for (beginner) hobbyists. My point being: it's very easy to "switch" to Godot when you've created nothing of note in other engines to begin with. You're not going to actually ship a game, so concerns about platform compatibility, stability, collaboration and so on are significantly less important than in an actual commercial project. There are real commercial games built with Godot, some of them even decent, but the vast majority of Godot users are never going to actually ship a game, same as with any other engine. I think we can only evaluate the true popularity of Godot years in the future; there's a lot of talk right now, but not much is actually being shipped.
forrestthewoods 2y ago
> I don’t think I’ve heard about an actual successful game launched based on the rust game dev ecosystem. Are there any good examples? No.
swiftcoder 2y ago
I think this is more a factor of time - Bevy is about the most mature open-source game engine written in rust, and it's barely 4 years old. If you released a game based on Bevy today, you would have had to have started development using an extremely early/unstable version.
- OtomotO 2y ago
  And rewritten your game multiple times (not all of it in one go, but the quite a lot of the APIs changed significantly in these last 4 years)
hyperfuturism 2y ago
There's Tiny Glade that's built with Bevy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAUSBxxgIbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAUSBxxgIbQ). It's not a AAA game, but a pretty polished indie game that looks amazing.
- OtomotO 2y ago
  But it doesn't use the renderer from bevy, unless they have switched ;-)
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    Being modular was one of the key features cart wanted for Bevy, so I'd count that as a success instead of a caveat.
sampullman 2y ago
I think Bevy will need a few more years to mature, and for tooling/ecosystem to grow around it, but the trajectory seems good. Rust can be frustrating when iterating fast due to compile times, but I've never felt hindered by the type system. For anything more complicated than a Tetris clone, I feel like it's a net benefit when things "just work." For quickly iterating on game logic and objects, making the game data driven and/or integrating a scripting language works well. For a game of simple to medium complexity, ECS isn't a must-have. I haven't experienced borrow checker issues with non-ECS approaches, personally. I'm under the impression the main benefits are decoupling systems and cache coherency, but could be mistaken.
cryne 2y ago
re "successful game[s]", Bevy's quick start guide says: > If you are currently trying to pick an engine for your Next Big Project™, we recommend that you check out Godot Engine. https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/introduction/ https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/introduction/
pizza234 2y ago
There are at least a couple of main reasons: 1. Rust attracts technically minded people, which is only a part (arguably not so important) of the skills/mindset required to produce a game; the result is that Rust as a community produces (way) more engines/plugins than games. 2. Rust is not convenient for fast iterations, typically required for games; when considering the game development landscape as a whole (ie. including indie production), performance is not as critical as thought, therefore the language loses the appeal compared to, say, C#. Over the last year, there have been a few articles by devs who actually produced a game in Rust, then left; this is one of the most recent: https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev.
dicytea 2y ago
Here's a few Bevy games I've been personally following: - Tunnet (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2286390/Tunnet https://store.steampowered.com/app/2286390/Tunnet) - Tiny Glade (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade) - DEATH TRIP (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2909010/DEATHTRIP https://store.steampowered.com/app/2909010/DEATHTRIP) - Times of Progress (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2628450/Times_of_Progress https://store.steampowered.com/app/2628450/Times_of_Progress) - Sentinels Inc. (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2302620/Sentinels_Inc https://store.steampowered.com/app/2302620/Sentinels_Inc) - Astortion (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1993980/Astortion https://store.steampowered.com/app/1993980/Astortion) - Jarl (https://www.jarl-game.com https://www.jarl-game.com) A lot of them is still under development, but if you want to see an already released one, see Tunnet above. Tiny Glade is also coming out in a few months. Also, I'm also pretty sure I've missed a few games here and there, but these are the ones that personally caught my interest. It's kind of funny how many Bevy games are floating out there, but people keep asking if one even exists. It strongly reminds me of the state of the Godot community just a few years ago, where outsiders constantly question the existence of Godot games every few threads (even though many already exists at that time). Now Godot has become one of the many relatively mainstream engines out there that indie game devs simply use without much question. I do hope that Bevy will share the same future.
paavohtl 2y ago
(the) Gnorp Apologue is a fairly popular clicker / idle game written in Rust which has sold at least 200K copies (https://steamcommunity.com/games/1473350/announcements/detail/4191235860382815044 https://steamcommunity.com/games/1473350/announcements/detai...). Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1473350/the_Gnorp_Apologue/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1473350/the_Gnorp_Apologu... The developer's article about using Rust: https://gnorp.dev/news/10-Hats-And-Rust/ https://gnorp.dev/news/10-Hats-And-Rust/
littlestymaar 2y ago
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/ Which, according to the post AHS over 1M whishlist. It's not an AAA game indeed, and it's just whishlist, but at the same time these are very impressive numbers for an indie studio on their first game.

by eknkc 2y ago

danr4 2y ago

BitCraft is rust-ish

baq 2y ago

If you’re expecting triple A titles from rust, that isn’t happening anytime soon. That said, the article lists quite a few examples of real games released on popular distribution platforms and with good reviews.

Ygg2 2y ago

What games Godot had at year 4? There is Tiny Glade for Bevy engine but not renderer. For Rust itself, I think Veloren was somewhat successful but it's in dev.

daghamm 2y ago
Godot was often #1 or #2 choice in game jams then. Hence even without AAA titles and console support it had a huge amount of developers testing it and improving it. I don't see the same thing happening with bevy. In fact, I see very few game developers using Rust. It's almost like fighting the borrow checker sucks the energy out of the creative process. (My current side project is in Rust)
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  > Godot was often #1 or #2 choice in game jams then. The major difference is that Godot is designed around an editor. That makes the on-ramp significantly easier (especially for folks coming to Godot from Unity or Unreal). Bevy is, in this context, more of a framework than an "engine" in the modern sense. There isn't yet a Rust-based equivalent to Unity/Unreal
  - runevault 2y ago
    Worth noting Bevy is trying to figure out their own editor which is intended to be built in Bevy, same way Godot's Editor is a Godot application. Until that happens only a more hardcore audience is likely to use the engine I agree. I know I'm waiting for both being closer to 1.0 and the editor before I take a serious dive into Bevy.
- Ygg2 2y ago
  Parent asked for games. I queried about same level of quality games when Godot was just as old (around 2018 it was 4 years old). Comparing game to game jam, is like comparing a house to Lego house models. Apples and oranges. > I don't see the same thing happening with bevy. I don't see eye to eye then. Make a good UI, slap some lua via wasm and you'd get similar work environment to Godot.

KronisLV 2y ago

> I see a lot of work being done on rust game engines / ecs crates / frameworks etc but I don’t think I’ve heard about an actual successful game launched based on the rust game dev ecosystem I’m pretty sure that you could say the same even about engines like Godot - they get a lot of hype but the adoption is somewhat slow and given that the majority of game projects go nowhere (at least in regards to indie developers), it might take a while until there’s a substantial base of released successful games, for any engine. I say, give it a decade.

runevault 2y ago
Godot has a few different successful games made with it. Cruelty Squad and Brotato coming to mind. Also Buckshot roulette which was made in Godot 3 though I think I heard they updated it to 4 at some point (which likely took some work as the syntax of gdscript changed).
- daghamm 2y ago
  The impression I get from r/gamedev is that since the Unity screw up one third or maybe even half of the indie developers have switched to godot. Godot is extremly easy to work with. It does not have all the bells and whistles of Unity or Unreal, but in turn is very small, simple and stable.
  - runevault 2y ago
    Just having less painful compile times at the start of projects is so nice. When I was using Unity even simplistic projects felt like they took forever. Even dotnet godot projects get running faster on average in my experience. Though sadly current c# godot projects cannot export to web. And even though projects can certainly slow down as they get bigger, at least getting bootstrapped is less painful (I haven't built anything of significant size, biggest thing was a jam game with one moderately sized level that loaded up pretty fast but I also cheated with a single bit of geometry for the level).
  - paavohtl 2y ago
    Most people posting to /r/gamedev have never shipped a game or even seriously attempted to (neither have I, to be clear). It's largely a forum for (beginner) hobbyists. My point being: it's very easy to "switch" to Godot when you've created nothing of note in other engines to begin with. You're not going to actually ship a game, so concerns about platform compatibility, stability, collaboration and so on are significantly less important than in an actual commercial project. There are real commercial games built with Godot, some of them even decent, but the vast majority of Godot users are never going to actually ship a game, same as with any other engine. I think we can only evaluate the true popularity of Godot years in the future; there's a lot of talk right now, but not much is actually being shipped.

forrestthewoods 2y ago

> I don’t think I’ve heard about an actual successful game launched based on the rust game dev ecosystem. Are there any good examples? No.

swiftcoder 2y ago

I think this is more a factor of time - Bevy is about the most mature open-source game engine written in rust, and it's barely 4 years old. If you released a game based on Bevy today, you would have had to have started development using an extremely early/unstable version.

OtomotO 2y ago
And rewritten your game multiple times (not all of it in one go, but the quite a lot of the APIs changed significantly in these last 4 years)

hyperfuturism 2y ago

There's Tiny Glade that's built with Bevy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAUSBxxgIbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAUSBxxgIbQ). It's not a AAA game, but a pretty polished indie game that looks amazing.

OtomotO 2y ago
But it doesn't use the renderer from bevy, unless they have switched ;-)
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  Being modular was one of the key features cart wanted for Bevy, so I'd count that as a success instead of a caveat.

sampullman 2y ago

I think Bevy will need a few more years to mature, and for tooling/ecosystem to grow around it, but the trajectory seems good. Rust can be frustrating when iterating fast due to compile times, but I've never felt hindered by the type system. For anything more complicated than a Tetris clone, I feel like it's a net benefit when things "just work." For quickly iterating on game logic and objects, making the game data driven and/or integrating a scripting language works well. For a game of simple to medium complexity, ECS isn't a must-have. I haven't experienced borrow checker issues with non-ECS approaches, personally. I'm under the impression the main benefits are decoupling systems and cache coherency, but could be mistaken.

cryne 2y ago

re "successful game[s]", Bevy's quick start guide says: > If you are currently trying to pick an engine for your Next Big Project™, we recommend that you check out Godot Engine. https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/introduction/ https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/introduction/

pizza234 2y ago

There are at least a couple of main reasons: 1. Rust attracts technically minded people, which is only a part (arguably not so important) of the skills/mindset required to produce a game; the result is that Rust as a community produces (way) more engines/plugins than games. 2. Rust is not convenient for fast iterations, typically required for games; when considering the game development landscape as a whole (ie. including indie production), performance is not as critical as thought, therefore the language loses the appeal compared to, say, C#. Over the last year, there have been a few articles by devs who actually produced a game in Rust, then left; this is one of the most recent: https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev.

dicytea 2y ago

Here's a few Bevy games I've been personally following: - Tunnet (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2286390/Tunnet https://store.steampowered.com/app/2286390/Tunnet) - Tiny Glade (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade) - DEATH TRIP (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2909010/DEATHTRIP https://store.steampowered.com/app/2909010/DEATHTRIP) - Times of Progress (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2628450/Times_of_Progress https://store.steampowered.com/app/2628450/Times_of_Progress) - Sentinels Inc. (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2302620/Sentinels_Inc https://store.steampowered.com/app/2302620/Sentinels_Inc) - Astortion (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1993980/Astortion https://store.steampowered.com/app/1993980/Astortion) - Jarl (https://www.jarl-game.com https://www.jarl-game.com) A lot of them is still under development, but if you want to see an already released one, see Tunnet above. Tiny Glade is also coming out in a few months. Also, I'm also pretty sure I've missed a few games here and there, but these are the ones that personally caught my interest. It's kind of funny how many Bevy games are floating out there, but people keep asking if one even exists. It strongly reminds me of the state of the Godot community just a few years ago, where outsiders constantly question the existence of Godot games every few threads (even though many already exists at that time). Now Godot has become one of the many relatively mainstream engines out there that indie game devs simply use without much question. I do hope that Bevy will share the same future.

paavohtl 2y ago

(the) Gnorp Apologue is a fairly popular clicker / idle game written in Rust which has sold at least 200K copies (https://steamcommunity.com/games/1473350/announcements/detail/4191235860382815044 https://steamcommunity.com/games/1473350/announcements/detai...). Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1473350/the_Gnorp_Apologue/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1473350/the_Gnorp_Apologu... The developer's article about using Rust: https://gnorp.dev/news/10-Hats-And-Rust/ https://gnorp.dev/news/10-Hats-And-Rust/

littlestymaar 2y ago

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/ Which, according to the post AHS over 1M whishlist. It's not an AAA game indeed, and it's just whishlist, but at the same time these are very impressive numbers for an indie studio on their first game.