Bevy game development tutorials and in-depth resources

136

GGenericCanadian 4 days ago 56 commentsRead Article on taintedcoders.com

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Discussion Sentiment

77% Positive

Analyzed from 1234 words in the discussion.

Discussion (56 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

tyleo•2 days ago

I really want to like bevy but compile times are slow and the output binaries are huge.

I built a few games in WASM and was shocked to see many of the bevy variants larger than the Unity versions.

There’s definitely a market for rust game engines but it seems that no one’s hit the sweet spot yet.

reitzensteinm•2 days ago

Compile times are my biggest struggle, too. I'm vibecoding Bevy with parallel agents, and the bottleneck is often compiling the changes on my 7950X, not getting Codex to write them.

As far as file sizes go, I'd be really interested in how a Rust compiler that didn't monomorphize so much would perform. Right now you have to modify the source code to write polymorphic generic functions, but it doesn't strictly have to be that way (at least as far as I can see).

I wouldn't use Bevy for a web only game either, especially while it's still single threaded on WASM.

0x1ceb00da•2 days ago

Bevy website has some tips for improving compile times, have you tried them out?

reitzensteinm•1 day ago

Yes, absolutely. I did that before vibecoding too, as rapidly editing and testing is so crucial.

The way Bevy's internal state is so easily saved and loaded is convenient for this.

alfiedotwtf•2 days ago

I hear Rust being slow to compile is their biggest gripe, but really - look at what you’re gaining for the slowdown!

Bevy gives you a very nice ECS to model your app but compilation can be slower than hand crafted code, while not using it gives you tonnes more code and the complexities that come with it, just to compile faster?

tyleo•2 days ago

I don’t know what you mean by, “just to compile faster.” Compiling fast is critical to game development. There’s no formula for fun so you have to iterate extensively.

I also don’t think that other solutions are “tonnes more code.” Any code will explode in size if poorly written. The same is true for bevy.

NewsaHackO•2 days ago

I swear I have only heard about ECS and people trying to show off how good the ECS is when it comes to Bevy, never about an actual game.

polski-g•1 day ago

"There are more rust game engines than rust games" - Confucius

CyberDildonics•2 days ago

Bevy gives you a very nice ECS

That's a single data structure. People say binaries start at 50 MB for a hello world program and 700 MB for the debug binaries.

https://old.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/16wcixk/cant_figure_o...

saghm•1 day ago

It's a single data structure that contains your entire game though? The whole point of the ECS is that literally everything uses the same data; it's like if you modeled every object in the world with one struct that has an optional field for every piece of data that could exist. I'm not saying that necessarily makes the tradeoff worthwhile, but calling it a "single data structure" is a bit reductive.

vivzkestrel•2 days ago

- since we are on the topic, i wanted to ask people here

- could someone kindly share some resources on c++ game development

- here is what i have

- https://gamedev.net/tutorials/

- https://shader-learning.com/

- https://learnopengl.com/

- https://shaderacademy.com/

- https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architect...

- https://github.com/0xFA11/MultiplayerNetworkingResources

- just a headsup, i am looking for 3D game development without unreal, unity , godot or any of those engines

tigerlily•2 days ago

https://lazyfoo.net/

krilcebre•2 days ago

Here's a great one: https://pikuma.com/courses/cpp-2d-game-engine-development

ivanjermakov•2 days ago

Handmade Hero

michaelteter•2 days ago

Those of us unfamiliar with Bevy can deduce what it might be, but it would be really nice if your introduction included at least a link titled "Bevy game engine" which links to bevy.org.

Then your unfamiliar readers can first hop to bevy.org to see what it's all about.

GenericCanadian•1 day ago

Very much agreed and appreciated. I've added an explanation to the top of the homepage.

nextaccountic•2 days ago

> These guides are up to date with Bevy version 0.18

This is huge, thanks. Unfortunately many Bevy resources became stale (the Bevy cookbook was even abandoned, there was little interest in keeping it up to date and so there were many sections for, say, Bevy 0.12)

reitzensteinm•2 days ago

This site is excellent. I emailed the author to thank them after reading it cover to cover, and they replied and asked if anything was unclear or if there was anything I wanted to see explored more.

Quite the dedication to a free resource!

roflcopter69•2 days ago

There's also ongoing work on the (for now hidden) Bevy Book https://bevy.org/learn/book/intro/

Already seems like a great resource to me but it's still WIP.

Based-A•2 days ago

As someone who is actively working on the Bevy Book, the next engine release should include the first public release of the Bevy Book. And once it's out, then we'll be doing our best to keep it updated and expand it alongside the Bevy engine.

dannersy•2 days ago

This is great news and thank you for work.

Tade0•2 days ago

Great news, thanks. I have to say that several times I tried to invent something from scratch only to eventually find, reading the documentation/examples, that Bevy already has that part covered.

I now default to the examples, but a book would greatly help.

jvuygbbkuurx•2 days ago

My problem with bevy isn't the basics, but the architecture. I always feel like I'm making wrong decisions on if something should be a component or a field, and how it interacts with other stuff in systems. I just feel like I'm making an unmaintainable mess, but I'm not sure how it could be improved.

GenericCanadian•1 day ago

I think ECS is a new enough architecture that the patterns are still very much folk lore.

I think a lot of the way I try and structure my Bevy apps comes down to trying to separate the rendering from my game logic. Its very easy to confuse the two responsibilities.

Coming from the web and Ruby I find the lack of automated testing and TDD to be foreign to me. So I've been trying to figure out patterns that make my games easier to test. Hoping to write about it soon.

ukoki•about 18 hours ago

> lack of automated testing and TDD

Rust has testing in the standard library -- IMHO Bevy is far easier to test than most game engines because it's "just rust". You can test game logic by starting headless apps, proding the ECS, and making assertions on the results.

For acceptance tests I've dusted off cucumber (after ten years of not thinking about BDD), as I it works great with Bevy

EddieRingle•1 day ago

> I think ECS is a new enough architecture that the patterns are still very much folk lore.

ECS is a pretty old idea, built on concepts that are even older. I was playing around with an ECS-like engine of my own in C over 10 years ago, based on blog posts and talks that are now 20-25 years old. Even the Wikipedia article for ECS can trace the origins back to the 1960s. (Though obviously it hasn't been applied to video games for quite that long.)

Nowadays I'd probably reach for Godot and Kotlin if I just wanted to build a game in an ergonomic language on a solid foundation. You could still apply ECS concepts there, as well.

bigbadfeline•2 days ago

> I always feel like I'm making wrong decisions on if something should be a component or a field... I just feel like I'm making an unmaintainable mess,

That is true for all game platforms, experience takes care of it, don't give up.

About compilation time concerns, it doesn't seem to be a problem with Bevy, there's a fast compile mode with very reasonable performance.

However, I didn't see any scripting, there are scripting options for rust, it would be good to have bindings for some rust-like scripting.

Ugvx•2 days ago

This has been on my list to kick off for a while. From previous times I looked at it, these tutorials are the only text based tutorials that are really kept up to date. Love it

jippo•2 days ago

Thank you. Not many free and in-depth resource for Bevy engine. Mostly are paid ones. I am surprised that you switch from Ruby to Rust. Seems a different beast to me.

jaggederest•2 days ago

As a long time ruby enjoyer and now also rust enjoyer, the core syntax and systems of rust are very rubyesque in a lot of ways, you can tell that some of the core contributors liked the language.

nextaccountic•2 days ago

yeah ruby API ideas and the _why poignant guide specifically, they were very influential in programming in general. a number of early rust devs came from ruby as well. all original authors of cargo worked on ruby's bundler earlier. etc

IshKebab•2 days ago

Really? What do you think comes from Ruby? Rust mostly seems to be inspired by ML and C++.

Actually I just checked the "official" list and they only list the closure syntax which seems pretty minor:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html

jaggederest•2 days ago

Iterator style, chaining, traits, blocks all feel very rubyesque, and expression syntax as well, plus the cargo toolchain is very bundler-informed.

littlestymaar•1 day ago

A significant portion of the prominent community members come from Ruby so I guess there must be something …

leafario2•2 days ago

Expression orientation

nextaccountic•2 days ago

> Mostly are paid ones.

can someone link to some of those paid resources?

GenericCanadian•1 day ago

I think Chris Biscardi has some paid resources that involve Bevy at https://www.rustadventure.dev/pricing they might be referring to.

He's also got plenty of free resources which I love to watch: https://www.youtube.com/@chrisbiscardi

ramon156•about 3 hours ago

To be fair, Chris is the guy for bevy. He's been making videos long enough to know how to use it properly

sivakon•1 day ago

can you tell me what those paid ones are?

SilentM68•2 days ago

Thank you :)