Zig gamedev project – left my job to build games in Zig lang

On the other hand, because Zig has incredible velocity, we're also seeing that std lib contributions or fixes we make (e.g. io_uring) are landed quickly, and that the community has some of the most talented programmers we've seen, who are also well aware of where the language is at (and like you, also looking forward to self-hosted).

As for TigerBeetle, when we made the decision to go with Zig, the only alternative for us was C since we needed a safe way to handle memory allocation failure and also wanted a simple language with high orthogonality and power, and C interop. However, C's toolchain even then was still not as "ready" as Zig's and Zig also presented a unique approach to safety (e.g. the compiler can check that all syscall errors are handled at compile time, and integer arithmetic and overflow is checked by default) plus comptime, which is a force multiplier.

To be fair, the days of debugging we save through Zig's safety compared to C's undefined behavior, we could easily spend a few hours contributing small fixes back to the language. And breaking changes between releases have also been fairly tame, and the changes welcome. We appreciate the velocity here.

The final insight for us was realizing that it would also take us some time to get our project to production, and that our roadmap would probably intersect with Zig's stability. We go into this decision some more in the Q&A at the end of our Zig SHOWTIME talk [2].

We could have skated to where the puck was at, or where we believed it would be, and we picked the latter. Technological waves can be incredible if you can spot the value ahead of the curve. In hindsight, this decision has paid off again and again. We would never go back to C. For new projects, there are a good many reasons to pick Zig, and for projects that may have a long half-life, this decision may be all the more important.

[1] https://www.tigerbeetle.com

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH2jvJ74npM (TigerBeetle — A Million Financial Transactions Per Second In Zig)

Full time indie is a fun and scary adventure at the same time, good luck!

One question, why DX 12? i'm kinda sad when i see indie choose proprietary non-portable tech..

Not to say that vulkan is better (i hate it), but i'm curious

That, combined with generally really fast compiles (again relative to C++ and Rust) is a nice combination for game devs.

The real reason was of course that I wanted to play with the new thing.

You are right, Market fit and the idea matter most (when assessing a new company)

But not all ideas should be weighed purely on profit. If op is in a healthy financial state and can shoulder the risk for a year, it’s hard to weigh the opportunity risk for him as a person. It might reinvigorate a love for programming or lead to a job in this new language. And ofc it may also just work ;)

Zig is perfect for game developers, and being one of the first in the space is going to be an advantage.

Also, the product here is actually defined as "Building gamedev ecosystem for @ziglang!" — Zig itself is part of the strategy here.

There are no business opportunities in independent games - they are passion projects, with little chance of payoff. So, if someone is passionate about his game idea and also passionate about Zig, it makes sense to combine both motivations in one project. He might not have enough passion to do the game in C++ or some other language he already knows and hates :)

1. It's the game from which the "all your base" meme comes.

2. The fighter craft that the player controls is called "the ZIG".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Wing

In regards to developing your own engine - it's almost never more efficient to do so nowadays, but it is almost always significantly more fun. If the author has enough wealth accumulated to quit their job and work on a passion project full time, I imagine they can afford to do something just for fun as the baseline.

That's it right there. You can spent years pretending to write a game while optimizing your from-scratch engine for features that probably no-one will ever use [1]. But I think it depends on what your goal is.

If it's a small hobby project, and you enjoy the process of writing your own engine (which, granted, can also be a great learning experience), then why not? You're probably in for the fun anyway.

I know some indie devs who learned the hard way that if your goal is in fact to eventually release a game, doing it without using an existing engine can reaaally drag things out.

I think it's tempting: you can get started on a new "engine" pretty easily, and get something up and running in a day or two. But then comes the long tail of adding all the other stuff, which often isn't so much fun.

A lot of the game development process isn't actually programming, so by writing everything from scratch, a programmer can artificially shift the focus into the direction they're more comfortable with.

[1] https://handmadehero.org/

Even ignoring that. I think there is a more fundamental question here as well. What type of maker do you want to be?

The problems usually start when people are more interested in writing the engine than making a game. Then they gravitate towards all sorts of fun technical problems that would be useful in a general purpose engine but not really for their specific set of problems. I’ve also seen this tinkering trap with general purpose engines but quite technical projects.