ggez

A Rust library to create a Good Game Easily.

More specifically, ggez is a lightweight game framework for making 2D games. It is built on SDL2, and aims to implement an API quite similar to (a Rustified version of) the Love2D game engine. This means it will contain basic and portable 2D drawing, sound, resource loading and event handling.

It's not meant to be everything to everyone, but rather a good base upon which to build. However, eventually there is also a ggez-goodies crate that aims to implement higher-level tools atop this, such as a resource cache, basic GUI/debugger, scene manager, and more sophisticated drawing systems such as sprites, layer, tiled maps, etc.

Features

• Filesystem abstraction that lets you load resources from folders or zip files
• Hardware-accelerated rendering of bitmaps
• Playing and loading sounds through SDL2_mixer
• TTF font rendering with rusttype, as well as bitmap fonts.
• Interface for handling keyboard and mouse events easily through callbacks
• Config file for defining engine and game settings
• Easy timing and FPS measurement functions.

Usage

ggez is built on the latest stable Rust compiler and distributed on crates.io. To include it in your project, just add the dependency line to your Cargo.toml file:

ggez = "0.2.0"

Examples

See the examples. imageview is a simple hello-world-y program that shows off a number of things, badly. astroblasto is a small Asteroids-like game.

To run the examples, you have to copy or symlink the resources directory to a place the running game can find it. Cargo does not have an easy way of doing this itself at the moment, so the procedure is (on Linux):

cargo build --example astroblasto cp -R resources target/debug/ cargo run --example astroblasto

Either way, if it can't find the resources it will give you an error along the lines of ResourceNotFound("'resources' directory not found! Should be in "/home/foo/src/ggez/target/debug/resources"). Just copy or symlink the resources directory to where the error says it's looking.

Extant things to do

• Everything that takes a Path should take an Into<Path> or something.
• Make it always possible to load resources from raw data instead of files.
• The Drawable trait needs to take &mut self
• Submit an update to the zip crate to make it possible to check whether a directory exists.

Future work

• Make subsystems modular, so we don't have to initialize sound if we don't need to and it's not a hard error if we can't use it. See https://www.idolagames.com/piston-sdl-window-with-sound/ perhaps.
• Make better mainloop handling; separate timesteps for physics and graphics. Interpolation???
• More and better docs
• Default font and print functions?
• Start integrating ncollide at least?
• Need to add more tests, somehow

It would be nice to have a full OpenGL-y backend like Love2D does, with things like shaders, render targets, etc. gfx might be the best option there, maaaaaaybe. Right now the API is mostly limited to Love2D 0.7 or so. Using OpenAL (through the ears crate perhaps?) for sound would get us positional audio too.

Useful goodies

• ggez-goodies for things that are useful but not fundamental and generally don't depend on each other
• specs for entity-component system (alternatives: ecs or recs crates)
• cgmath or vecmath for math operations? nalgebra does great too.
• physics/collision???

Credits

• http://opengameart.org/content/flappy-dragon-sprite-sheets
• http://opengameart.org/content/cozy-endless-game-background