Recently, I released my first game on itch.io called Defend Your Eggs!

This is an exciting first milestone as I think I have a nugget of some fun gameplay in there that I’m going to continue expanding on and see how far it goes. For now we’ll be sticking with the programmer art though :).

I’ve had lots of fun experimenting with new technologies to make this prototype like Bevy. Before this I had barely touched Rust and I had primarily been a Go programmer; discarding all the Terraform and k8s YAML I had written of course. I’ve definitely fallen in love with the Rust compiler, and the language server. I’m a die hard neovim user, and the experimenting I had been doing in Unity with C# and the Omnisharp language server just doesn’t cut it. There are definitely some rough edges so I’m glad I’m working on a 2D game with simple art. I think my lack of 3D modeling experience would really set me back needing to figure out a blender-to-bevy asset pipeline rather than something like Unity where I can drag and drop and fumble my way around.

That said, I’ve got a lot of interest in the nitty-gritty details so Bevy is currently a great avenue to be pushed to learn more of the details along the way. This will likely be helpful even if I were to use another engine like Unity for a different project, as I’ll have a better understanding of how things should be working under the hood, which has always helped speed up my debugging sessions in the past.

I have avoided frontend development for most of my career, but guess what Bevy uses the flexbox layout algorithm for it’s UI! There is a ton of complexity to be found here, so it’s been a bit of a struggle to stay on task sometimes, but the learnings here are important. They have already been used to help make a simple frontend for a leaderboard for Defend Your Eggs as well as to adopt website templates to make this blog!