Is This Working Group Still Active?

[Cody-Duncan]

I was looking for ways to contribute to the rust gamedev community. I wasn't sure where to find them, so I came here.

Most of the updates here seem to have stopped in 2023. Is this working group still active?

[AlexEne]

Hi,

I stopped being active some time ago due to life and work getting in the way.
I know of a few others who have moved on as well.
Now, that said, in my opinion, today rust is perfectly fine for doing games.

We already have some examples, with most prominent one being Tiny Glade:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/

So best contributions now is to just make games :).
If not, Bevy is fairly active and probably in need of some help.

[Cody-Duncan]

I don't wholeheartedly agree. I think it's a lot better today that it was, but there's still a ton to do.

Overall

1. There's still a ton of problems to solve.
2. There's no communal visibility of game development activity.

Problems to Solve

Goals

• Gather a list of all the main gaps that separate us from the ideal state described in the introduction. ...

• https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/blob/master/charter.md

Said list is at: https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/blob/master/known_issues.md but hasn't been updated in 6 years.
For example

• "RLS in VS Code robustness & performance EmbarkStudios/rust-ecosystem#8: RLS in VS Code robustness & performance" has since been resolved.
• "Better debugger experience in VS Code EmbarkStudios/rust-ecosystem#9: Better debugger experience in VS Code" remains pending improvements.

In the interim, https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/ was published, and provides a litany of new perspective. A major theme is that the requirements of the language and system add substantial friction to the gameplay iteration process. Solving that problem in Rust may require some wild creativity and tons of work. If solved, it removes a major risk factor inhibiting Rust adoption in gamedev.

I would guess that there's probably a ton of new problems now, and that we'd need outreach and surveying of various developers to identify them, prioritize, and promote efforts to solve them.

Community Visibility

One of the talks at RustConf demonstrated that communal publication gives visibility to the goings on in the community, which engages others to join, contribute, hack, and support.

That talk demonstrated such visibility was a key contributor to the Rust language and ecosystem's overall and continuing improvement. I argue that similar visibility into the Rust gamedev space would have similar ecosystemic benefits.

https://gamedev.rs/ has gone without updates for 1year + 4months.

Where else am I going to find rust game dev community goings on?
Where are all the gdc-presentation-like blog articles of how problems were solved, analytical observations of overall ecosystem challenges, or an announcement list of games made in rust like https://void-craft.itch.io/meteor-mayhem ? There's a lot happening, and no longer any vistas from which to see it all.

Towards What?

It's my opinion that Rust may eventually become an essential tool of the game development community. (It's certainly starting to push that way in terms of services architecture behind multiplayer games.)

The foundations of Rust are solid, enabling steeper productivity curves towards higher capability ceilings. If a Rust engine can begin to approach and match the likes of C++ and Unity/Unreal/Godot, I think it will be clear that Rust is capable of substantially surpassing them. At which point, Rust goes from being niche to standard.

So I'd like to imagine a future, maybe 10-20 years from now, wherein newbies ask
"What language / engine should I learn to make games?"
and the answer has changed from "C++ and Unreal/Unity",
to " Rust / Bevy or yet-to-be-made or Unity-rs or Unreal-rs".

I don't think it's enough to say "one can make games in Rust."
I think we should strive for "one should make games in Rust."
Or at the very least "all trade-offs considered, it's no better or worse to make games in Rust." (for the Senior+ engineers)

And the consequence is that gameplay systems and experiences that future developers create become safer, more performant, and more varied than ever.

To get there, Rust game development needs the eyes of the Rust community at large and the existing gamedev community (e.g. in C++) to see the goings on, feel like it's going somewhere, and that they can and want to contribute. I think that's what working groups like this are for.

[17cupsofcoffee]

One of the talks at RustConf demonstrated that communal publication gives visibility to the goings on in the community, which engages others to join, contribute, hack, and support.
...
https://gamedev.rs/ has gone without updates for 1year + 4months.

Thanks for sharing that talk - it's interesting to hear from the TWIR maintainers, as on the face of it, our newsletter is (was?) a very similar project!

As one of the former editors of the newsletter, I personally think that the key difference is:

• TWIR contributions are usuallly only one sentence (a link), and require very little review/editing.
• TMIRGD contributions were generally an entire paragraph, with embedded images and multiple links, which required extensive editing to get a consistent voice/style!

The amount of effort that it took to get a PR merged was discouraging for the contributors and exhausting for the maintainers, and I think that's ultimately what led to things going silent. If anyone ends up trying to pick up the torch on the newsletter (whether as a continuation of ours, or as a new project), I think ease of contributing really needs to be at the forefront of their mind.

[aclysma]

I'm no longer using rust and am not active in the community anymore. I noticed this post though, and it seems like this group will either be archived or rolled over to some other form of rust organization: rust-lang/leadership-council#126