Bevy 0.5: data oriented game engine built in Rust

Personally, I'm building my turn-based tactical RPG in it, which is absolutely a Big Project, but I'm not planning to release for a year or two, don't need complex 3D features and am devoting half of my effort to engine dev.

For single-player games that aren't very asset-heavy, I would say 3 months or so for UI to stabilize is a safe point to start work.

For games that have complex animation or sound needs, require networking or want to use a ready-to-use physics library, I'd estimate about 2 years from now.

If you're trying to build a game with very-little coding (and want something comparable to Unity or Godot), "a very long time" :)

Thanks to the work of lassade, our resident animation expert, I expect we should have basic animation in place for 0.6. For skeletal animation in particular, they've been prototyping with a crate of their own [0] to hook into Bevy that seems like an excellent proof-of-concept.

0: https://github.com/lassade/bevy_spine

Once that's launched, I expect that we'll be working on making Bevy more usable through the editor for low-code users, although the goal is to ensure that pure-code (and pure Rust) Bevy games have feature parity with anything you can do in the editor.

For example, you could use only the Bevy ECS if you didn't care about the rest.

You could replace `bevy_winit` (window creation using the winit library) with your own alternative.

The only drawback to this design is that you can't add / remove components instantly[0], and instead need to wait for the next "hard sync point" at the end of the stage.

0: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/1613

However, that said, many of us are already building "real games" with Bevy. I've been using bevy almost since day-1, and none of the updates have been particularly difficult/painful. The changes have always been easy to adapt to, especially with the Rust compiler helpfully pointing out everything you need to fix ;).

In terms of features for building "real games", bevy is still lacking in many areas:

- UI is very primitive (this is the next focus area to be worked on)

- animation (already in progress)

- audio (community-made plugins are available)

- advanced rendering features and performance optimizations (also already being worked on)

- there is no editor yet

Given the super active development pace of Bevy, many of these areas will greatly improve soon.

If you want to make a content-focused game with lots of assets and requiring a level/scene editor, Bevy is not ready yet. However, if your game is more code/programming/logic heavy, I definitely recommend that you try Bevy already now. The programming experience is awesome, the ECS ergonomics are really good. It's really easy to code game logic.

Reasonably bug free, yes. Not too hard to upgrade, yes. Are critical features missing or inadequate (audio, animations, networking, UI...), also yes ;)

But, just like making a game engine, there are a huge number of parts to making your game. If it's a weekend project, you can patch it up with 3rd party integrations and focus on the parts that are currently great.