Bevy Engine, and its ecosystem.

Initially this will be an "article/blog" of sorts. However in the near future, I would like to showcase some guides/examples on how you could get some basic tools and maybe a basic project going.

Todays popular game engines.

Today if you are interested in game developoment, and your new to the field, typically you'll find yourself with two maybe three "popular options". For indie development, you will be drowned out by everyone talking about popular options such as Unity, Unreal, and maybe the accepted Godot option. To be quite blunt, I'm going to talk about why I dislike these options and it will probably come off as rude if you've invested a lot of effort into learning these tools, so understand that is not the intention. This will make more sense when I talk about why I like Bevy.

In short, I do not like Unity nor Unreal. They have both traumatised me from both the developer side and gamer side of things. None of the developer skills marketed as "easy" translate outside of Unity or Unreal. Granted I don't have much time invested into these engines, but frankely, as soon as I saw all the walls of UI buttons, it quickly became overwhelming and boring. Game development is a form of expression/art, and if your not having fun during the process, what are you doing. Granted if it actually works for you, and you enjoy it, I'm not here to tell you how to live your life. Yet this isn't exactly an uncommon story, Blender is a very popular tool for 3D projects, try learning that as a beginner and again you'll become very overwhelmed. This has lead a lot of artists to alternatives that are simply easier to navigate.

I don't know about Unreal, but Unity is a very suspicious software and I do not trust it at all. I had an experience during my installation and un-install and I refuse to ever try it again.

This Next section will be my old gamer rage coming out (toned-down).
From the gamer perspective, I have become very frusturated with games made from Unity and Unreal. I don't really play video games that much anymore for plently of reasons, one of which being I genuienly dislike modern games. I don't mean just the "Triple A" games, but also the indie ones, so many just put very little effort into optimization or just genuine creativity. I blame a lot of this on Unity and Unreal, for making the game-development process "simple". You've sacrificed the soul of your game, for a simple cheap "solution". Quite commonly whenever I express how a game is terribly made, a very cringe argument "get a better computer" comes up. Despite what many may think, a hardware solution is NOT a solution to a software problem. Expecting your users to have "good hardware" shows incompetence.

What is Bevy?

So what are you to do? You could make your own game engine which many do and its very commendable. However not everyone has the time or maybe even know-how to do such a project. The next best thing you can do is use someone else's game engine project. That's what Bevy is. Bevy is a second iteration of a game engine written in Rust, initially it was called Amethyst engine, however it was becoming difficult to maintain/build. So the developers scrapped Amethyst took the lessons they learned from there and applied it to Bevy. This was a good and healthy process because now Bevy every year is becoming so much more powerful, and you don't have to go through it!

Bevy is open-source, so lets say you don't like some parts of the engine, or you want to add something. Hey awesome that's really easy to do just fork the repository and bam you have full control of everything. Additionally, because of the fact its open-source and designed to be very modular, you actually have a LOT of options. For example Bevy is an engine, but intentially, lets say, minimal. It doesn't come with its own physics engine or graphical user interface. This could be alarming for some, but its actually exactly what you want. In the community the popular physics engines you can use for bevy are Rapier, Avian, and I think one named Thunderbolt? Want a nice dialogue system? A popular community choice is a crate (library/package/repository) called yarn-spinner. Do you actually want/need a UI for de-bugging or development, hey you can actually get one going really quickly with bevy-inspector-egui crate. That's why bevy itself although being a simple "game-engine", is really more of a community driven ecosystem, where so many people help each other out and build out various solutions tailored for the developer, by developers.

Another such area, in Bevy the system for building UI is litterally imitating HTML and CSS practice. Yes its not exactly and litterally HTML/CSS, but it imitates it as best it can within Rust, and that's why using Bevy is such a breath of fresh air. Maybe you already understand HTML and CSS ok great then building UI for your game in Bevy will actually not be so difficult for you to pickup. It's the fact that Bevy follows the "Standard practice" which is what makes it so great.

Finally Bevy is a ECS or Entity Component System and is written in rust. This means that structurally, its forcing you to make a much more efficient project than traditional Object Orientated Programming structures such as Unity use. This means that even if you aren't the best say programmer, Bevy is already helping you make a better project just by how it works, and the rust compiler a very powerful and sophisticated tool, is very pro-active in helping you out.