Hello, in this tutorial we will introduce game development in Rust using Bevy, a free and open source data-driven game engine.
The final result of this course is a cross-platform minesweeper you can test in this live version:
Disclaimer
The tutorial focuses on the following goals:
- Breakdown basic Bevy features and the ECS making a minesweeper
- Using development tools such as the inspector gui, the logger, etc.
- Developing a generic bevy plugin making good use of the state system and resources
- Having Web Assembly support
The programming choices are not the most efficient but allow to fulfill the goals. For example, you may notice that the uncovering system has a 3 to 4 frames delay:
- frame 1: click event read and tile trigger event send
- frame 2: tile trigger event read and Uncover component insert
- frame 3: Actual uncovering
There are better ways to do this but this way you learn to receive and send events, place components in order for a system to query it, etc.
A decent understanding of the Rust language is a prerequisite.
Note that this is my first Bevy project, there may be improvements so trust the latest version of the code.
Technologies
Why an ECS?
I have experience in game development using Unity3D component system using C#.
It is very user-friendly, but I think Object-oriented programming is getting obsolete, and I wanted to try an Entity component system.
Unity made an ECS, why not use it?
Unity is taking the leap towards ECS, but looking at the documentation I found it very complex and honestly, bad.
Maybe they were forced to compromise with the existing core but it doesn't stand the comparison with Bevy's ECS.
Why Rust?
I love the rust language, I love game dev, I wanted to try the combination.
Also, since I wanted to experiment with an ECS which is the incarnation of the Compound VS Inheritance pattern in game dev,
using Rust is very natural.
Furthermore, I find garbage collection to be a critical issue in game dev and Rust completely wipes it away.
Resources
We will be using the 0.6 version of the Bevy engine:
Some resources I used that you should check out:
- The bevy cheat book
- The bevy examples
- The bevy discord where the community is very active and helpful
The assets I used are not mine, they are all free for personal use, please check the credits.
I suggest you follow the tutorial using a modern IDE, like Jetbrains CLion or VS Code with the Rust plugin.
ECS
So what's an Entity component system?
The Unity documentation has a nice graphic explanation of ECS:
It's a data-oriented coding paradigm using the following elements:
- Entities: representing an object via a simple identifier (usually a classic integer)
- Components: structures that can be attached to entities, containing data but no logic
- Systems: functions using Component queries to apply logic
The point is to apply identical logic to all Health components instead of applying logic to a complete object.
It is more modular and makes it easier to manage in threads.
The final element would be Resources which are data shared across systems.
Author: Félix de Maneville
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Published by Qongzi
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