[exDM69]

> Rust game development seems more about releasing half baked crates than actual games

It's because these are mostly passion projects by hobbyists. A lot of the stuff is written by undergrad students with a lot of time on their hands, and once they graduate and move into professional life they no longer have the time and the projects get abandoned.

Creating high quality, reusable components (like game engines) takes a lot of effort. It's unlikely to happen without funding.

And that's only half of the story, to make an actual game (or other product) you'll still need the art content which is expensive.

I'm about 3 years worth of Saturdays and 20kLOC into my current project in this field and I haven't even released anything because I don't need anyone to tell me it's "half baked". While I have some stuff that's starting to be in a shape where it could be usable to others, it would still need a lot of effort to make it friendly for others (e.g. api docs, examples and stuff) to jump in. That again takes effort (there are only so many Saturdays in a year) and it's much less interesting work than doing the research-ey bits and experimental work.

Unfortunately I think this is a chicken and egg problem. No-one with the funds and the staffing to build a game or an engine isn't going to jump in to unproven technology. Not using Unreal or Unity is a huge gamble to take with your business venture.

[indy]

There's nothing wrong with writing your own game engine rather than going for Unreal or Unity, in fact that's one way of creating a truly unique game.

My comment about "half baked" referred to the crates that people release instead of actual games.

The Rust game dev community might be wise to steer away from the "we gave up on developing our game, but hey Rustaceans, here are some crates you might find useful!" approach

[johnnyanmac]

despite being in the same industry, engine programmers =/= game designers. You may as well be comparing a network engineer to a front end web dev.

As for "actual games": indie dev with mature tools is hard enough as is to properly ship. and many don't make money. Making the kind of game that would attract attention requires funding that these communities often lack.

[indy]

I was thinking of the kinds of games mentioned in this thread: Tiny Glade and The Gnorp Apologue. Small indie games made by people who fill the role of both engine programmer and game designer.

On a larger, more professional scale someone like Jonathan Blow comes to mind

[xqt40]

There are plenty of passion projects that have been successful. So this is not an excuse. I've abandoned rust because I don't find it useable to me with unneeded complexity to code. Also with graphics most of the code was not safe. So believing only took me that far.

[johnnyanmac]

so the retort is survivor's bias? Hollow knight was a game jam game, so my 2d autorunner definitely coulda made 8m dollars, right?

>I've abandoned rust because I don't find it useable to me with unneeded complexity to code.

I don't want to be too dismissive, but if you dont care about code safety, Rust is the absolute worst language to choose for game development. Yes, it's a lot more work upfront and iterative game development wants to break things quickly to figure out a good game loop.

I want to make a game myself in Rust one day and I know for certain that my scripting will definitely not be in Rust.

[xqt40]

Dude, it is not safe programming if you put all your code under unsafe brackets.

You can write safe code in other languages but it really requires more advanced programmers than Rust programmers will ever be - the idea of Rust is to simply taking out responsibility from all programmers and puts it on Rust developers, so how much you care about code safety - that is not what you need to think when programming in Rust.

>>>I want to make a game myself in Rust one day and I know for certain that my scripting will definitely not be in Rust.

I mean - do I need to say more?

[johnnyanmac]

>it is not safe programming if you put all your code under unsafe brackets.

Put less code in unsafe brackets. I haven't seen how a proper renderer is made in Rust, but I'd be shocked if something on the scale of Bevy's still was just "Rust without rust" as a quick c++ port.

I'm sure there Wil inevitably be some low level hardware tricks that need unsafe blocks, but that's much less needed in most modern code than back in the day. And if we're being frank, those kinds of optimizations probably aren't top priority compares to, say, a proper front end scene graph to interact with.

>I mean - do I need to say more?

That every language has strengths and weaknesses? I'm all for any wisdom you wish to share. I won't pretend to be an expert in any language.

My design decision (or rather, suspicion) comes more from the fact that scripting needs different demands (rapid iteration) than the underlying foundation (rendering/physics/asset management that can create the nastiest kinds of bugs). Therss inevitable issue bridging languages, but I think overall it would give the best of both worlds.

[kunos]

> Dude, it is not safe programming if you put all your code under unsafe brackets.

I'd be surprised in my Rust game (custom engine) had more than 1% code in unsafe blocks. If your does have "ALL under unsafe brackets" you are doing Rust really wrong.