Rust game development: Building games with Rust

Have you ever thought about building a game using Rust? If you're a developer looking for a more efficient, secure and high-performance language for game development, Rust might just be what you need.

Rust is a systems programming language that has been designed to make it easy to write complex, performant software that scales with minimal runtime overhead. The language's unique features include memory safety, zero-cost abstractions and ownership models, making it ideal for building games and other resource-intensive applications.

In this article, we will explore how Rust is ideal for game development, its unique features and how to build games with Rust. Let's dive in!

Why use Rust for game development?

As aforementioned, Rust is a systems programming language that promises both high-performance and safety features. Ultimately game development is one of the areas where performance and safety are critical. Rust is designed to be fast and efficient, thanks to its zero-cost abstractions that help optimize code at compile-time.

One of the most important things about programming games with Rust is working with graphics. Rust conveniently provides a graphics engine called gfx-hal. This engine provides a low-level, low-overhead wrapper over Vulkan and DirectX 12, which makes it easy to leverage the full power of modern graphics hardware. The combination of Rust and gfx-hal offers a massive speed boost for game graphics, making Rust the ideal choice for 3D game development.

Another unique feature of Rust that makes it suitable for game development is its ownership and borrowing models. These models offer significant performance benefits by ensuring that ownership of resources in your game is explicit and enforced at compile-time, avoiding the cost of runtime garbage collection.

At the same time, Rust's ownership model offers several safety benefits that ensure your game does not crash or freeze due to common programming mistakes such as null pointers, buffer overflows or incorrect memory allocation.

Building games with Rust

Now that we know why Rust is an excellent choice for game development let's explore how to build games with Rust.

Understanding Rust's ecosystem

Rust's game development ecosystem consists of several game engines, libraries, graphics engines and frameworks. These tools provide a range of functionalities, including physics engines, artificial intelligence, networking and input handling.

Some of the popular Rust game engines include:

• Amethyst: A data-driven game engine built on top of gfx-hal and offers abstractions for writing custom game logic.
• Piston: A modular game engine that enables developers to build 2D and 3D games with different backends including OpenGL, DirectX and Vulkan.
• ggez: A lightweight game engine built on top of SDL2, and offers simple abstractions for game development.

In addition to these game engines, Rust offers several libraries that are critical to game development, such as serde, a data serialization and deserialization for Rust, and rand, a random number generation library.

Creating your first game

To create your first game with Rust, you need to start by installing Rust and a Rust project manager such as cargo.

Once you've installed both Rust and cargo, navigate to the directory where you'd like to create your Rust project and create a new Rust project using:

cargo new my_game

Now, navigate to the newly created directory by running:

cd my_game

The cargo new command has created a basic Rust project with the following files:

├── Cargo.lock
├── Cargo.toml
└── **src/**
    ├── lib.rs
    └── **main.rs**

The my_game directory is the root directory for your new Rust project, and src is where all source code files for your project will reside.

Let's edit the src/main.rs file to create your first game window. Replace the contents of the file with the following code:

extern crate ggez;

use ggez::{Context, GameResult};
use ggez::graphics::{self, Color};

fn main() -> GameResult {
    let (mut ctx, mut event_loop) = ggez::ContextBuilder::new("My cool game", "Me")
        .build()?;
    let mut my_game = MyGame::new();
    graphics::set_background_color(&mut ctx, Color::WHITE);

    while let Some(event) = event_loop.next(&mut ctx) {
        match event {
            event::QUIT => {
                println!("Quitting!");
                break;
            }
        }
        graphics::clear(&mut ctx);
        graphics::present(&mut ctx);
    }
    Ok(())
}

The above code creates a new window, sets the window name to "My cool game", and then clears the window and presents it to the screen. At this point, you should run the game using:

cargo run

If successful, you should see a blank window with the name "My cool game". You've made your first game with Rust!

Adding game logic

Your game needs a game loop to continuously update and render game objects. Let's modify the game loop from your first game to add logic for handling game objects.

extern crate ggez;

use ggez::{Context, GameResult};
use ggez::event::{self, EventHandler};
use ggez::graphics::{self, Color, DrawMode, DrawParam, Rect};
use ggez::input::keyboard;

struct MyGame {
    rect: Rect,
}

impl MyGame {
    fn new() -> MyGame {
        MyGame { rect: Rect::new(0.0, 0.0, 32.0, 32.0) }
    }
}

impl EventHandler for MyGame {
    fn update(&mut self, ctx: &mut Context) -> GameResult {
        let x_move = if keyboard::is_scancode_pressed(ctx, event::Scancode::Right) {
            1.0
        } else if keyboard::is_scancode_pressed(ctx, event::Scancode::Left) {
            -1.0
        } else {
            0.0
        };

        let y_move = if keyboard::is_scancode_pressed(ctx, event::Scancode::Down) {
            1.0
        } else if keyboard::is_scancode_pressed(ctx, event::Scancode::Up) {
            -1.0
        } else {
            0.0
        };

        let vector = cgmath::Vector2::new(x_move * 5.0, y_move * 5.0);
        self.rect = self.rect.translate(vector);

        Ok(())
    }

    fn draw(&mut self, ctx: &mut Context) -> GameResult {
        graphics::clear(ctx);

        graphics::rectangle(
            ctx,
            DrawMode::fill(),
            self.rect,
            Color::BLUE,
        )?;

        graphics::present(ctx);
        Ok(())
    }
}

fn main() -> GameResult {
    let (mut ctx, mut event_loop) = ggez::ContextBuilder::new("My cool game", "Me")
        .build()?;
    let mut my_game = MyGame::new();
    Ok(())
}

In this code, we've defined a game object called MyGame and a game loop that updates and renders the game object. In the game loop, we use cgmath for vector math, listen for keyboard inputs, and move our rectangle object based on the input received.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Rust is an ideal language for game development that offers high-performance, safety and ownership models to ensure your game code is efficient and reliable.

In this article, we explored how Rust game development is an excellent choice for game development, why developers use Rust for game development, and how to build games with Rust. We hope that you've learned a lot and are inspired to start building games with Rust!

Remember, Rust is a unique language with a vast and supportive community, and there's always a new library, tool, and feature that makes game development more accessible and efficient. Happy game development with Rust!

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