upbge VS bevy

Starting with 2d games is very good advice however if the child is mostly interested in 3d, well not the most helpful advice.

Some people here forget that children are way more tolerant of not understanding things than adults are. They just want to get a quick taste not necessary dedicate their life to the study of game development.

I think something like RPG in a Box https://rpginabox.com/ is nice if the child likes Minecraft-style graphics. Also it is worth checking out if modding an existing games is something that might be of interest. Also blender is perfect, as it allows to focus on certain aspects on modeling first and in has an amazing game engine that can be solely driven by logic bricks: https://upbge.org/#/

Still, I think even something like Unreal should not be ruled out if the child is dead set on making a "real" game (9 years is a bit pushing it admittedly with help it might work out). For a visually-motivated child that has access to beefy computer, Unreal is the perfect tool to get things done early and fast. Load the starter template and they have a character they can walk around with in the first minute. Grab some free-for-the-month asset packs and they can make decent looking levels in a day or two that they can show friends and be proud of. And if they get to the point of needing logic, the visual scripting language is more than enough to make complete games in it.

Unreal is a monster of complexity but but perfect for just hacking together a quick asset-flip demo one can feel good about. They will learn about the realities of game dev soon enough, let them have some fun.

Also, if the child is the kind to need a more focused approach, blender is a nice choice

It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.

Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

And

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...

If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.

[0] Beginner friendly 2D library:

[1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D): https://www.ursinaengine.org/

[3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/

[4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/

UPBGE which was formerly part of Blender is the only modern 3D engine I know of that supports Python for game development.

Otherwise, if it doesn't work, I'd suggest creating an issue at the UPBGE repository: https://github.com/upbge/upbge/issues

Yeah, they some people came back and revived it, they're adding some hella cool features like being able to render with eeve https://github.com/UPBGE/upbge

Link to issue:https://github.com/UPBGE/upbge/issues/1760

Another would be https://upbge.org/ 3D game engine forked from the old Blender Game Engine and deployed with Blender itself.

Bevy. A very young engine where you need to write the game entirely in Rust—that was appealing. But fatal flaws overshadowed everything: no editor, the engine brutally enforces the ECS approach, and the game's architecture must literally bend to fit this paradigm. So, you won't migrate to another engine at all—you just throw away all the code and start from scratch.

Missing one of the best choices as long as "maturity" isn't on the top of your list: Bevy - https://bevyengine.org/

Game engine written in Rust, leveraging ECS in almost every place and way, with a really capable WASM export option. Wrestling ECS for the first time might take you some time, but in my experience helps you keep game code as clean and decoupled as game code could be.

I don't see WASM/WebGPU changing anything when it comes to gaming, as an industry, personally. 3d visualizations and interactive websites? Yeah definitely a nice improvement over WebGL 2, if years late.

WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.

Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.

That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.

(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)

I was working through an example in the repo for the Bevy game engine recently and came across this code

That's possible. I did spend quite a bit of time tinkering with compiler flags, and followed the recommendations.

Some notes I found just now seems to agree with my results, though: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3978#issuecomment-...

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

I've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation. You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)

I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context.

I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread with UI rendering suuucks.

If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

These days, some game engines have done pretty well at making compute shaders easy to use (such as Bevy [1] -- disclaimer, I contribute to that engine). But telling the scientific/financial/etc. community that they need to run their code inside a game engine to get a decent experience is a hard sell. It's not a great situation compared to how easy it is on NVIDIA's stack.

[1]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/shader...

This is the API you need: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/9774