+++ title = "This Month in Rust GameDev #50 - April 2024" transparent = true date = 2024-05-03 draft = true +++
Welcome to the 50th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup's monthly newsletter. Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!
You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!
- Announcements
- Game Updates
- Engine Updates
- Learning Material Updates
- Tooling Updates
- Library Updates
- Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub
- Other News
- Meeting Minutes
- Discussions
- Requests for Contribution
- Jobs
- Bonus
Way of Rhea just got a release date: it will be coming to Steam on May 20th, 2024!
Way of Rhea is a color based puzzle game with difficult puzzles, but forgiving mechanics being developed by @masonremaley in a custom Rust engine.
You can support development by wishlisting Way of Rhea on Steam, or signing up for the mailing list.
Recent updates:
- A closed beta began
- All characters now have voices
- A reset button was added for when undo is inconvenient
- Speech bubbles now identify the speaker
- Orbs now are shown with an "xray" effect so they are visible even when behind scenery
- Older CPUs without AVX support are now supported
- Various speedrunning features were added
- Secrets were made harder
- An in game achievement UI was created
- An in game Jukebox UI was created
- For more updates, see the release notes on Steam...
SM64JSARCHIVE Source code available on the (GitHub, sm64jsarchive is a rewrite of the decompilation project of Super Mario 64 JavaScript as an actively maintained fork instead. The reason this was made as original sm64js's developers and admins / moderators got demotivated and fully left the project sm64jsarchive was made as an new reboot of sm64js.
The backend server has been finally been able to start after 10 long months and is now live to https://mmo.sm64jsarchive.com
The newest updates have been:
- Working MMO
- More stable changes to the games client
A stress test is scheduled for 2024-4-10 12:25 CST and everyone is invited!
Note: if you have a laggy computer or something like that and the page does not load within 10-20 minutes then please try refreshing.
Official demo available soon
Open Combat (Website, GitHub, Discord) is a real-time tactical game which takes place during the 2nd World War.
Some major changes since last news !
- Basic HUD is now complete
- Hight definition map finished for the demo
- Basic game logic finished
The game demo is almost finished. Some things are missing like soldier high definition assets, or minimal AI for opponent. But the demo is playable and we need some alpha players to make feedbacks 🎮 ! You can find game binaries on the Github page. Please come and see us on the Discord to make your feedback !
Times of Progress (Steam) is an upcoming city builder game set during the industrial revolution.
During the month of April:
- The orders systems (how buildings request resources from other buildings) has been refactored to improve performance and make better use of the ECS.
- Lots of UI widgets have been developed, in particular those related to showing stats about currently hovered and selected building, as well as during building placement.
The demo is not available yet but interested players can sign up for the upcoming closed beta by joining the newsletter.
More GIFs and progress updates are available on Twitter and Mastodon.
Monk Tower (itch.io, Google Play, Github) is a tiny coffee-break roguelike game, intended for short runs (ca. 15mins).
The gameplay is quite distilled and revolves mostly around resource management. The player has limited inventory capacity and the weapons get damaged after each use. There are 20 randomly generated levels to beat.
It is available on desktop (Windows / Linux), Android an Web (mobile friendly). The game is open-sourced - together with a custom WGPU-based 2d framework.
_Discussions: (/r/roguelikes)
You are Merlin (Web Game, GitHub - Rust/CLI, GitHub - WASM) by @hseager is a text adventure game that compiles to both CLI and WebAssembly.
This initial version features a main quest, side quests, items and a boss fight. Players can choose their favourite theme such as Zelda, Warcraft and Fallout. With the web version, players can select their prefered input method of buttons or keyboard and fully works on mobile. Although fairly simple, this first version provides a good foundation for building more features in later updates.
_Discussions: (Reddit post)
Bottomless-Pit is a 2d game engine written with WGPU that has been around for a year which can be found on crates.io and GitHub. Very recently a 2d camera was added as well as WASM and web support. Current development is being focused on stability and QoL changes like texture sampling options and improved input. You can checkout several engine examples on the web here. Since the engine is in it's infancy it would be great to have developers use it and give the engine some feedback. Current features are:
- Custom Shader Support
- basic rendering
- text rendering
- input and window event handling
lightyear_website is a comprehensive networking library for bevy to make multiplayer games. It comes with multiple types of transports (WebTransport, WebSocket, UDP, etc.) and supports replication techniques like client-side prediction, server interpolation, interest management and more! Check out the examples!
The latest release, 0.13, brings two big new features:
- Steam support: you can now use the Steamworks SDK as your transport layer, which lets you use the Valve network! Note that lightyear supports running multiple transports in parallel, so it's possible to have cross-play between steam and non-steam users.
- Listen-server mode: it is now possible to run a server and a client in the same process/bevy app. This can be useful to avoid the costs of a dedicated server, or to have a similar codebase between singleplayer and multiplayer.
BulletPrespawn2.mov
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