Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

arewegameyet.rs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–139 of 139 posts

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#131

Post by TheHideout »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #128
TheHideout wrote: post #24

Tangentially related - if anyone is new to Rust and wants to see some simple mini text game examples, I've been working on a bunch [0]. It also includes some more complicated text games: Asylum - Choose your own adventure style interactive narrative Knights and Barbarians - Simple turned based strategy game Legend of the Rusty Dragon - Simple adventure game inspired by Legend of the Red Dragon [0] https://github.com/…

Neat! I used these as an excuse to play with / work on WASM build tools / WASI interop. I've uploaded a built version to github so you can play them directly in your browser: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/cargo-html/wiki/Examples#ru... I've sent a couple of PRs for things I found useful - feel free to ignore them if they're not to your liking ;)

Great, thanks!

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#132

Post by wly_cdgr »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #40

Are there any resources for developing 2D game graphics, especially for hobbyists? It seems like game development articles focus so much on frameworks and just assume everyone knows where to find / how to make graphics, audio, etc. I would be especially interested in a high level "how to make a game" that didn't go so in-depth into the programming details but which did include procuring the assets and perhaps some st…

For 2d gamedev, I recommend raylib, GMS2, or Godot

If I had to pick one, I'd say go with raylib. Free, open source, lightweight, portable, friendly and helpful Discord community, super helpful and friendly and engaged lead dev, bindings to tons of languages, builds for many platforms, straightforward high-level API that is sufficiently documented by a simple cheatsheet, a great set of related gamedev tools taht are also developed and maintained by the same lead dev, and it's just a (C99) library, not an inverted-control framework. So you just have a while loop in main() that checks for whether the window should be closed and lets you do whatever updates in whatever order you want.

If you ultimately develop commercial indie aspirations, you may want to move to GMS2 as it makes it easier to do things like publish to consoles and integrate Steam APIs. Tons of commercial indie hit have been made and continue to be made with GMS2.

Stay away from Unity....2d is a second-class citizen in Unity.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#133

Post by wly_cdgr »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #40

Are there any resources for developing 2D game graphics, especially for hobbyists? It seems like game development articles focus so much on frameworks and just assume everyone knows where to find / how to make graphics, audio, etc. I would be especially interested in a high level "how to make a game" that didn't go so in-depth into the programming details but which did include procuring the assets and perhaps some st…

As for process, main advice for games is just to get to working prototype ASAP and start playtesting ASAP.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#134

Post by virtualritz »

radarsat1 wrote: post #89
virtualritz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an effort to automate generating mid-level C bindings for C++ code automagically, to enable easier wrapping in high level Rust APIs, by an unofficial Academy [of Motion Pictures] Software Foundation group. It is called C++-- [1]. At this time we only target the VFX C++ ecosystem but I'd be surprised if people wouldn't use (and extend) this to cover a broader set of C++ libs. Maybe you can give an example of…

That's kind of hilarious given the role that C++ to C compiler had in the early development of the language [1]. But sounds useful, thanks for the link. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront

There is also this, [1], which wasn't on my radar until today:

"Corrosion, formerly known as cmake-cargo, is a tool for integrating Rust into an existing CMake project. Corrosion is capable of importing executables, static libraries, and dynamic libraries from a crate."

[1] https://github.com/AndrewGaspar/corrosion

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#135

Post by dmwallin »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #67
dmwallin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hard to do in a one-size-fits-all fashion because there's a wide range of 2d techniques, tools, and processes available, depending on a multitude of factors, some example ones being: - Game genre / mechanics - Your team size/skill sets/experience - Game engine - Target platform(s) - Monetization strategy 2d games in particular support a wide variety possibilities. If you narrow it down I can more easily point…

Yeah, I guess I'm thinking "hobbyist", so team size of 1 and no monetization strategy. Simple game engine (preferably in Go or Rust or some similarly approachable language; my hobby time is to precious to be writing C/C++ again), but maybe getting into the nitty gritty of game engine is too low-level for the write-up that I'm thinking about. I don't have a specific idea for a game, but I'd probably like to putz aroun…

If you goal is to work on a top down Rpg-style game, as a single developer I would HIGHLY recommend using a tool like RPG Maker (https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/)

Games like Pokemon/Zelda are very content driven and usually don't have any sort of complex systems that require deep access to game engine internals. As someone working solo, you are going to want to spend most of your time creating fun/interesting content. Tools for this genre have been built many times before by people with far more experience building them. If you spend your time rebuilding them yourself, it's a recipe for stalling out without having much to show.

If your goal is really to just have fun building out gameplay systems as a programming challenge, I recommend using a lightweight code-oriented scripting language engine. Some good examples in this space are LÖVE (Lua, https://love2d.org/) or Phaser (Javascript, https://phaser.io/). These will allow you to jump right in to building games without needing to learn a graphical UI and are usually more agnostic about how you build your game than fully featured environments.

If you prefer the latter, but still want to end up with a finished game at the end, I recommend scoping down from an RPG to something like a Sokoban-style puzzler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban). Use a tool like Puzzlescript (https://www.puzzlescript.net/) to prototype your mechanics. Once you've finalized your mechanics you can then recreate it in the engine of your choice and add any polish. Having a playable prototype will make it much clearer what systems you will need to build.

Best of luck building!

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#136

Post by cztomsik »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #106
slmjkdbtl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing high level game logic in Rust is not fun, you spend more time waiting for compilation and dealing with language problems than real game dev fun.

Rust doesn't have to be slow, look at the Bevy engine for example

Bevy is the nicest ECS I've tried yet you can prototype something much faster in JS. And prototyping is the fun part.

After 2ys doing rust all I can say is that it is nice as long as you know exactly what you want to do. And you often hit the wall because rust is still very young and there are not many libraries.

And more you know rust and do advanced stuff the more you hit bugs & unfinished things in rust itself. And I can tell you it's really hard to swallow when you need to redo something for the third time just because you are ahead (and nightly doesn't really help, sometimes it just opens another bag of bugs because those new features do not work together)

Try doing some GUI in rust, there's literally nothing complete right now, druid & iced are the most promising ones but still far from production-ready.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#137

Post by datalus »

gmueckl wrote: post #18
datalus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust has good C interoperability. So from C++ it’d look like a C library. You can either write your own glue code or use something like cbindgen to autogen the header file.

Many interesting SDKs come with C++ APIs that aren't necessarily translatable to C. Choosing Rust for engine development has the potential of severely hamstringing the team. It is the same tough uphill battle for all languages that aren't C++. Even more so now that the smoke is slowly rising from the battlefield of licensed engines and only a few contenders remain standing. And all of them have a massive C++ codebase…

True, Google is at least trying to make it easier to bind to C++ [0]. It's still pretty experimental, though.

0: https://github.com/google/autocxx

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#138

Post by worldsayshi »

chmod775 wrote: post #120
worldsayshi wrote: post #6

Some of the libraries seem stale. libovr is "Last Updated almost 5 years ago" so I guess it's abandoned? Maybe the last updated status could be brought to the arewegameyet page?

Last updated doesn't tell you a lot for finished things. That site instead displays usage metrics, which are much more useful: they tell you whether other people find that library useful right now . I don't care whether a flac decoding library was updated in the last decade if it does its job.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a "finished" software project. Do you have such example?
Post reply on HN