Update :

Game development in Rust has made some big leaps in the past few years. While it’s pretty hard to nail down “what is a gamedev library?”, the metric of success is very straight forward: Every new game written primarily in Rust is a win.

The current state of Rust gamedev is showing lots of promise:

Rust has two quickly maturing game engines in ggez and Amethyst

Rust’s cross-platform story (including intense focus on WASM) is immensely valuable for game developers.

gfx-rs is shaping up to become the de facto graphics backend for Rust whilst playing well with a lot of other independent projects.

I’ve seen a great deal of ECS fragmentation in gamedev. If the Rust gd community manages to consolidate around Specs, that’ll make all the shared pieces that much more compatible.

A very strong backbone for games is quickly maturing: gfx-rs, glutin & winit, lyon, PistonDevelopers, specs, nphysics, gltf, rodio, RustAudio, rlua etc.

Active micro-community on /r/rust_gamedev

Rust has officially been adopted by AAA game studios Ready at Dawn and Embark Studios as well as the wildly popular indie developer Chucklefish (pdf).

Ludum Dare 42 just completed with 4+ Rust entries: https://reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev/comments/977dpc/my_ludum_dare_42_jam_entry_is_pure_rust/ https://reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev/comments/96sjlj/ludum_dare_48hour_game_jam_submission_running_in/ https://github.com/ryanisaacg/ld42 https://github.com/amethyst/ludumdare42



So what good could a working group do?

Bless certain toolchains as “editor’s pick”. One of the most frequent questions on rust_gamedev is “How do I get started?”. @kvark made one such doc a year back. Good to see that everything listed is still highly relevant and not defunct one year later.

Consolidate the space. For starters, rust_gamedev, arewegameyet.com and possibly https://github.com/rustgd and https://github.com/pistondevelopers/ could all be under the same umbrella, coordinated by this WG.

Try to map & track the dependency graph. Figure out which problem areas to highlight for new contributors.

Organise Rust-specific game jams

Coordinate a group of evangelists who will readily and honestly talk about the upsides and downsides of Rust for game development as it stands today.

I am not volunteering to lead this group, at least not alone. I know there’s plenty of Rust gamedev giants out there so my hope is that I can help those giants get organised.

On a personal note, I’d like to explain what excites me most about Rust. As a non-programmer I can only measure its technical merits in the number of projects that I see having success with it, but it’s the leadership’s focus on community that really excites me more than anything else. I’ve never before seen a major open source project (especially a programming language) be so obsessed with actually maintaining a culture of positivity and constructive dialogue. The team is also very transparent and accessible.

I co-led the Java game engine jMonkeyEngine for 7 years. With Java there was this huge divide between the language developers and the library developers. In Rust many of the low level graphics libraries that this fledgling gamedev ecosystem is growing on top of are maintained by developers from Rust core and/or Mozilla.