bevy VS Godot

This is something that can certainly happen. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the Bevy engine, in which a total of 246 contributors agreed to relicense the engine, as explained in this blog post. However, in this case it was done for the good of the engine and its users.

If you are using Rust, you should check out https://bevyengine.org which is a rust based game engine with a focus on ECS

I was crowing to my game dev buddy about how he (a Unity C-sharp developer) ought to check out Bevy and Rust because the Rust type system is friggin’ awesome!

Code examples: https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/ecs/

License is Apache 2.0 OR MIT:

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/LICENSE-APACHE

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/LICENSE-MIT

For those who are more code centric and like rust, https://bevyengine.org/ is a good alternative to godot as far as open source goes.

It's become rather popular in the graphics (e.g. https://wgpu.rs/) and game dev (e.g. https://bevyengine.org/ ) spaces.

It's pretty popular for AWS Lambda functions.

Pretty popular for terminal / shell applications.

Definitely a great way to write wasm for compute or graphics intensive browser/web apps.

It seems like the best way to approach levels for a desktop build is to save and load scenes as shown in this example (which seems pretty straightforward), but as noted in that file, this doesn't work on WASM since there isn't a file system.

If you like you can copy what I did: https://github.com/tbillington/bevy_toon_shader, which I copied from https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/ (just that my repo has was less stuff, so might be easier to copy from).

I think Rust for games has come really far. I will cite https://arewegameyet.rs/ "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue.".

All the blocks are there and the language is really well suited to games.

On top of my head:

The pros:

- The crate ecosystem and the package manager makes it really easy to integrate any useful component such as pathfinding, spatial partitioning, graphics backend, audio system.. Most crates take a lot of effort to be cross-platform so I can develop on linux and not spend too much time debugging windows releases.

- The strong typing and algebraic data types makes expressing the game state very pleasant. I also found I was able to develop a very big game without too many bugs even though I don't write many tests.

- Ahead of time compilation + LLVM guarantees you won't have to optimise for weird things around a virtual machine. Rust gives you more control to optimise hot loops as you can go low-level.

- I find wgpu to be the perfect balance between ergonomics and power compared to Vulkan. OpenGL support through wgpu is also a nice addition for lower end devices.

- The Rust community is very helpful, you can often talk directly to crate maintainers

The cons:

- Compilation times, when compared to JITed languages such as C# can be very painful. It can be alleviated by buying a 3950X but I still often get 10-30s iteration times.

- The static nature of Rust means you often need a dynamism layer above to tweak stuff that can be awkward to manage. I made inline_tweak for this purpose but it's really far from how easy Unity makes it. https://github.com/Uriopass/inline_tweak

- Since Rust feels very ergonomic, you are tempted to write almost all game logic within it, so mod support feels very backwards to implement as you cannot really tweak "everything" like in Unity games. Thankfully "Systems" game like Factorio or Egregoria can be theoretically split into the "simulation" and the "entities" so mod can still have a great impact. Factorio is built in C++ so has the same problematic. Their Lua API surface is quite insane to be able to hook into everything. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

Now, I have to talk about Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/. It did not exist when I started but it is a revolution in the Rust gamedev space. It is a very powerful 100% Rust game engine that makes you write game code in Rust too. It has incredible energy behind it and I feel like if I'd used Bevy from the start I wouldn't have had to develop many core engine systems. Its modular design is also incredibly pleasant as you can just replace any part you don't like with your own.

Learn how to draw sprites to the screen: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/2d/sprite.rs

Unity, the platform that powered our game, recently implemented policy changes and they seem to have an ethical stance that doesn't sit well with us. We will not use Unity in the future unless we need to update the most recent version, which, mostly is untested. As of now. We're uncertain about whether we'll explore alternative engines such as Godot or Unreal. The absence of recent development activities coupled with the prospect of mastering a new engine introduces a considerable challenge, making the pursuit of game development feel more distant. We're currently in the process of deciding whether we want to continue along this path of game development, but we want to encourage all indie developers!

> Our engine had a unique feature called Spaces: separate worlds/levels that you can instantiate

This is, as far as I can tell, exactly what the Godot engine does[1]

[1]: https://godotengine.org/

As others have pointed out, the docs are a little lacking for this particular feature. I did, however, find some great information in the original merge request https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/62961#issuecomment-1184677418 and this one too https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/68678

Second, the default export templates do not have PCK encryption. Google play will give you a warning once you upload your app bundle. You will have to make a key and compile custom android templates. See this and this. This is extremely important as your game files and sensitive information could be exposed. I dislike that this isn't explicitly mentioned in the exporting for android (or I guess exporting in general) section of the documentation. I will likely make an issue later today, or hopefully someone can make one before me!

When you download and use Godot, you do so under the project's open-source license, in this case, the MIT license; which can easily be found in the open repository in the LICENSE.md file.

> Exporting Mono projects is supported for desktop platforms (Linux, Windows and macOS), Android, HTML5, and iOS. The only platform not supported yet is UWP.

And from a recent Github discussion for 4.2: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/73257

This often-repeated statement doesn't really communicate how the editor works. While it does use many of the same APIs, you couldn't build the editor from within the editor (bootstrapping). The editor itself is largely written in C++ and not Godot's integrated language GDScript, you can see for yourself https://github.com/godotengine/godot/tree/master/editor

P.S I found these cool new engines: https://godotengine.org/, https://www.unrealengine.com/