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Hello, in this tutorial we will introduce game development in Rust usingBevy, a free and open source data-driven game engine.

The final result of this course is a cross-platform minesweeper you can test in thislive version:

Disclaimer

The tutorial focuses on the following goals:

• Breakdown basic Bevy features and the ECS making a minesweeper
• Using development tools such as the inspector gui, the logger, etc.
• Developing a generic bevy plugin making good use of the state system and resources
• Having Web Assembly support

The programming choices are not the most efficient but allow to fulfill the goals. For example, you may notice that the uncovering system has a 3 to 4 frames delay:

• frame 1: click event read and tile trigger event send
• frame 2: tile trigger event read and Uncover component insert
• frame 3: Actual uncovering

There are better ways to do this but this way you learn to receive and send events, place components in order for asystem to query it, etc.

A decent understanding of the Rust language is a prerequisite.

Note that this is my first Bevy project, there may be improvements so trust the latest version of the code.

Technologies

Why an ECS?

I have experience in game development usingUnity3D component system using C#.
It is very user-friendly, but I think Object-oriented programming is getting obsolete, and I wanted to try an Entity component system.

Unity made an ECS, why not use it?

Unity is taking the leap towards ECS, but looking at thedocumentation I found it very complex and honestly, bad.
Maybe they were forced to compromise with the existing core but it doesn't stand the comparison with Bevy's ECS.

Why Rust?

I love the rust language, I love game dev, I wanted to try the combination.
Also, since I wanted to experiment with an ECS which is the incarnation of theCompound VS Inheritance pattern in game dev,
using Rust is very natural.

Furthermore, I find garbage collection to be a critical issue in game dev and Rust completely wipes it away.

Resources

We will be using the 0.6 version of theBevy engine:

Some resources I used that you should check out:

• Thebevy cheat book
• Thebevy examples
• Thebevy discord where the community is very active and helpful

The assets I used are not mine, they are all free for personal use, please check thecredits.

I suggest you follow the tutorial using a modern IDE, like Jetbrains CLion or VS Code with theRust plugin.

ECS

So what's an Entity component system?

The Unitydocumentation has a nice graphic explanation of ECS:

It's a data-oriented coding paradigm using the following elements:

• Entities: representing an object via a simple identifier (usually a classic integer)
• Components: structures that can be attached toentities, containing data but no logic
• Systems: functions usingComponentqueries to apply logic

The point is to apply identical logic to allHealth components instead of applying logic to a complete object.
It is more modular and makes it easier to manage in threads.

The final element would beResources which are data shared acrosssystems.

Next Chapter

Author: Félix de Maneville
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Published byQongzi