Bevy's Game Engine Fourth Birthday | Hacker News Reader

Bevy's Game Engine Fourth Birthday

bevyengine.org

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I feel like every time Bevy is mentioned, on HN or elsewhere, a common question is "what are some examples of shipped games made in Bevy?" and there usually is not much to show, which is a big problem, while I personally have no interest in Rust/Bevy, and will most likely stick to C++ for game development, I feel like it would be in Bevy developers' best interest, to create showcase games. Currently, there are some technical demos and feature show offs, but these always look convincing regardless of the engine, because it's trivial to make trivial things look nice, however, it's hard to grasp the full picture of how ergonomic a framework/engine is without looking at a more complex project. Personally, if I could have a suggestion for Bevy developers, I would encourage them to implement things like a Minecraft clone, a Quake-type game clone, and maybe a platformer like Mario, to create a proper showcase of different components/features combined all together, furthermore, if they released such demo projects under a permissive license, it would allow people that are more into gameplay programming and less into engine/low-level programming, to just take these projects and build upon them, which would accelerate Bevy's adaptation and popularity.

I'm not sure I agree it's a good idea at this stage in Bevy's lifetime to dedicate significant effort away from the core project to showcases.

I agree it would be ideal if such projects existed, but at this point it probably makes more sense for development to be focused on fundamentals like their upcoming editor.

How do they know if they are building the right thing?

Bevy is a community-driven engine, and there are hundreds of hobbists making small games with it already, providing tons of feedbacks and often even pull requests.

The kind of feedback they lack at the moment is more feedback from professional shops especially big ones, but it's not the kind of things they can dogfood anyway.

On the contrary, dogfooding early would allow you to more easily spot design flaws and steer the project in the right direction accordingly.

Close collaboration with the users of the library can provide the same benefits. Without taking core developers away work working on the core. There seems to be dozens of games in development using Bevy, so that is a good sign!

> "what are some examples of shipped games made in Bevy?"

There's a bunch of shipped products listed halfway through the post: https://bevyengine.org/news/bevys-fourth-birthday/#even-more...

Shipped games, specifically:

- Tiny Glade, a game that uses Bevy ECS and Bevy App (alongside a custom renderer) has over a million wishlists on Steam. They just wrapped up a very well received public demo and by all accounts are looking to have an excellent release.

- Tunnet is a 3D "computer network building game" that released on Steam and itch.io and received great reviews.

- El Mono is an "ape rampage" game that recently released on Steam.

- GLOW is "an addictive physics-based arcade game that will challenge you to your limits" that released on Steam

> I would encourage them to implement things like a Minecraft clone

- Ethertia is a minecraft-like sandbox voxel game -- https://github.com/Dreamtowards/Ethertum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFIfp8o0CiI -- looks neat.

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?

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.

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.

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)

> 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

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

I think that this is a bit of an unkind take, but also a truthful one. I've shipped a few (mediocre) games in my freelance developer days with Unity and actually finishing a game and getting it out the door is more time consuming than most might believe, same as with software and the 80/20 principle. Especially when the majority of game developers are quite starry eyed and have fantasies of grandeur that lead to attempting projects with unchecked scope creep.

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with engines that let you iterate very quickly and come up with game jam worthy games, ones with smaller scopes, oftentimes not even 3D graphics. That's why even arguably technically limited platforms like GameMaker have also had good games developed in them that have seen success.

It's just that there's definitely a bit of a disconnect between what the loudest voices will say/praise and what the more corporate projects will require.

Also Cassette Beasts.

May not be as much as Unity, but there are enough success stories.

But in the case of Bevy, can you tell a game is made with it?

I actually almost edited my post to add Cassette Beasts as I remembered it after the fact.

As for Bevy I haven't heard of any success stories like the Godot ones, but I also don't keep up with it to that degree yet, I'm mostly keeping an eye for when it gets closer to 1.0 and the editor at which point I want to take a deeper dive.

And how old was godot when they were made?

No further questions, your honour

Godot was released in 2014. That's ten years ago, so it's 6 years older.

Bevy was also quite rough for the first few years, focused a lot on foundational work.

It will take a while longer to see whether it can become a success or not.

> 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.

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.

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)

There's Tiny Glade that's built with Bevy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAUSBxxgIbQ).

It's not a AAA game, but a pretty polished indie game that looks amazing.

But it doesn't use the renderer from bevy, unless they have switched ;-)

Being modular was one of the key features cart wanted for Bevy, so I'd count that as a success instead of a caveat.

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.

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/

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.

Here's a few Bevy games I've been personally following:

- Tunnet (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2286390/Tunnet)

- Tiny Glade (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade)

- DEATH TRIP (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2909010/DEATHTRIP)

- Times of Progress (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2628450/Times_of_Progress)

- Sentinels Inc. (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2302620/Sentinels_Inc)

- Astortion (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1993980/Astortion)

- Jarl (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.

(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/detai...).

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1473350/the_Gnorp_Apologu...

The developer's article about using Rust: https://gnorp.dev/news/10-Hats-And-Rust/

BitCraft is rust-ish

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.

I wonder how more often I'll read about the UI focus... It was a focus point at the beginning of 2023, in a blog post.

UI is hard…

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