Adopting rust-game-ports for neutral examples

[erlend-sh]

@64kramsystem is pretty far along with a project that I believe would make an excellent community-driven project for the GameDev WG.

This would be in a similar vein as #89, which arguably went quite well even though it’s not that actively updated; I like to think we collectively realized that speed is only one aspect of an ECS, and a rather small one at that once a baseline of performance has been established.

rust-game-ports has a greater potential for ongoing development because ‘How do you made Game X in Engine Y’ is an ever-evolving question.

From the rgp readme:

The completed ports are:

Source	Game	Engine
Code the Classics Vol. 1	Boing	ggez
Code the Classics Vol. 1	Cavern	Macroquad
Hands-on Rust: Effective Learning...	Rusty Roguelike	Bevy (ECS)
Code the Classics Vol. 1	Soccer	Fyrox

I currently don't plan any further ports.

What I’m suggesting is inviting the Rust gamedev community to add new example games to this repo, so the matrix of different games continues to expand. What we want is games like pong, boing, space invaders etc. to be implemented side-by-side in several engines. Engine devs are incentivized to lend a hand with these examples to make them representative of best practice.

[64kramsystem]

Hi there! I'm the maintainer. I think that this idea has a great value 😄

Something that struck me is that, while developing the project(s), I've found bugs on very basic functionalities on several (if not all) of the engines¹, hinting - IMO - that currently, they are used only in a narrow way. I think that a structured, organized project to build small-but-complete games, could be a significant next step in the Rust game development. Individual experiments are valuable, but the maturity of an engine is more than the sum of its parts.

This type of projects, again IMO, has a very low barrier to entry (assets and source are provided²), and it includes different, but canonical, game genres; I think that, ultimately, it's a very stimulating way to approach the topic of (Rust) gamedev, and could (hopefully) bring it forward.

[¹] As an example, in the last days I've found what I believe is a bug in the fullscreen functionality of an engine/library; this is a fundamental functionality 😬
[²] I can't thank enough the programmer of the original series 😍

[erlend-sh]

Since the proposal has only received positive signals and no dissenting opinions were expressed in the past week, we’ve gone ahead and moved the repo over:

https://github.com/rust-gamedev/rust-game-ports

Next step will be to make an official call-to-action for anyone who wants to add a game (and possibly also new engine-representative) to the collection.

[erlend-sh]

I put out a preliminary CTA here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev/comments/wbwfxi/gamedev_wg_rust_game_ports_welcomes_your_game/

Let’s see if anything comes of that. We might follow up later with an official blog post, hopefully with some new examples to talk about 😊

[64kramsystem]

Let’s see if anything comes of that. We might follow up later with an official blog post, hopefully with some new examples to talk about blush

I have a few ideas (and I also will update the README), however, I'll wait for the community reaction, in order to see the shapes it take.

If anybody intends to (co/)maintain this project, let me know, so we can organize 😄

[64kramsystem]

Let’s see if anything comes of that. We might follow up later with an official blog post, hopefully with some new examples to talk about blush

The Wireframe magazine is, IMO, the absolute best source to use a basis for the project. It even has a book on writing a game in Unity, with assets and stuff, which would be fantastic as test case for Fyrox (but it's beyond my current skills).

Additionally, the magazine is distributed in a pure hacker spirit - the magazine is free if one wants, and sources/assets have liberal licenses.