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This curated list is from the Game Development in Rust Discord server and prioritizes libraries and frameworks that have examples and are ready or almost ready for production.
For a longer list of libraries and frameworks, see Are We Game Yet?.
- Rust book.
- Standard library - Comprehensive guide to the Rust standard library APIs.
- Edition guide - Guide to the Rust editions.
- Cargo book - A book on Rust’s package manager and build system.
- Rustdoc book - Learn how to make awesome documentation for your crate.
- Rustc book - Familiarize yourself with the knobs available in the Rust compiler.
- Compiler error index - In-depth explanations of the errors you may see from the Rust compiler.
ECS/DOD is quite a big deal in Rust. Here are some resources to understand the basics:
- Understanding data-oriented design for entity component systems - Unity at GDC 2019.
- CppCon 2018: Stoyan Nikolov “OOP Is Dead, Long Live Data-oriented Design” - Harsh title (ECS/DOD is not a silver bullet for every problem), but useful regardless.
- RustConf 2018 - Closing Keynote - Using Rust For Game Development by Catherine West - A classic presentation already - Catherine West gives several examples, explain the problems with them, and shows the alternatives.
- "Data-Oriented Design" web book by Richard Fabian.
Recommended if you are going to work with 3D graphics, however, API changes still might happen in future releases.
- bevy Refreshingly simple data-driven game engine.
- ambient Runtime for building high-performance multiplayer games and 3D applications, powered by WebAssembly, Rust and WebGPU.
- fyrox Feature-rich, production-ready, general purpose 2D/3D game engine written in Rust with a scene editor. Formerly known as
rg3d. - hotham lightweight, high performance game engine for standalone VR headsets.
Recommended if you are going to work strictly with 2D graphics.
Some open-source games made in Rust:
- RecWars A multiplayer top-down tank shooter. Already has some basic gameplay and a playable browser version.
- RustCycles A third person arena shooter that's about movement, not aim. You have to be smart and think fast.
- Station Iapetus A third person shooter where you play as a task force agent on a space prison near Saturn's satellite Iapetus.
- Flamegrower Flamegrower is a 2D platformer revolving around physically simulated vines. In a solarpunk-inspired eco-futuristic world threatened by an invasive alien plant species, you control an android gardener tasked with killing it with fire.
- Digital Extinction A 3D real-time strategy (RTS) game set in the near future when humans and AI fight over their existence.
- Oort A space fleet programming game.
- One-Man-ggj21 A 2D side scrolling shmup game for Global Game Jam 2021. It has 1 level and 3 enemy types.
- Egregoria An indie city builder, where each individual has its own thought model, meaning every action has its importance and influences the environment. Egregoria is focused on the socio-economical aspect of a city, with a logistics element.
- automancy A game about Automation, themed around Magic, based on Hexagons, and -- there's no Conveyor Belts.
- Mage Rush A very tiny vampire-survivors-like open-source game (playable: iinacho.itch.io/mage-rush).
- Sandbox A sand simulation game.
- As the Wind Blows Set in a world of floating sky islands, this immersive battle game invites you and your friends to enjoy together.
- Just Join (来噻) Voxel multiplayer game.
- Veloren Multiplayer voxel RPG inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft.
- Hypermine An experiment in 3D hyperbolic space, with multiplayer, infinite procedural terrain, and voxel editing. It is very easy to get lost.
- qffp Queer folk farmpunk: farming on the moon demonstrates the possibility of creating animated pixel art games that run in a terminal. -Space Frontiers online community multiplayer game that seeks to support a galaxy consisting of multiple sectors and spaceships. Active cooperative and PVP gameplay takes place in and around manned spaceships together with a foundation of Role-Playing-Game features.
- Qwy3 Wanna-be Minecraft-like in Rust using Wgpu, very early stage.
- Zombie Shooter Game Inspired by Crimsonland: eliminate hordes of zombies that relentlessly chase after you.
- ROOM - Rusty Doom Rewrite of Doom C in Rust. Where possible, the Doom behaviour is kept intact, while also making some improvements.
- Stellar Bit
- mirr/orb Laser bouncing puzzle game made in Rust.
- FlappyTetra Game about a fish that has to jump through seaweed.
- velgi Clone of the first level of Velgress from UFO 50, made for Eggjam #24.
- astray TUI-based space strategy game.
- moba A Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game.
- wgpu Cross-platform, safe, pure-rust graphics api (Vulkan, Metal, D3D12, D3D11, OpenGLES, WebGPU).
- rend3 Easy to use, customizable, efficient 3D renderer library. Built on top of
wgpu. - rafx Multi-backend renderer that prioritizes performance, flexibility, and productivity.
- ash Low-level bindings to Vulkan.
- lyon GPU-based 2D vector rendering. Built on top of
wgpu. - luminance High level. Built on top of OpenGL.
- miniquad High-level. Focus on portability. Built on top of OpenGL, GLES 3 and WebGl1.
- golem Intermediate-level. Higher level wrapper built on glow.
- vulkano Intermediate-level. Safer wrapper for Vulkan.
- glow Low-level. Safer wrapper for OpenGL and WebGL.
- erupt Low-level bindings to Vulkan.
- gl46 Low-level. Wrapper for OpenGL 4.6 (generated by Phosphorus).
- gl33 Low-level. Wrapper for OpenGL 3.3 (generated by Phosphorus).
- screen-13 Screen 13 is an easy-to-use Vulkan rendering engine in the spirit of QBasic.
- sierra Low-level control and high-level features. Built on top of
erupt.
I believe it is fair to say that if you use libraries built on top of WGPU, you will get wider support on modern platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS).
- winit Rusty windowing framework. The de facto standard in the Rust community.
- glfw Rust wrapper for the C GLFW3 library.
- fermium Rust wrapper for the C SDL2 library. Contains more than window creation features.
- sdl2 Rust wrapper for the C SDL2 library. Contains more than window creation features.
- thunderdome Generational arena inspired by generational-arena, slotmap, and slab. It provides constant time insertion, lookup, and removal via small keys returned from
Arena. - slotmap Container with persistent unique keys to access stored values.
- generational-arena A safe arena allocator that allows deletion without suffering from the ABA problem by using generational indices.
- hecs Archetype-based.
- yaks Add multi-threading to
hecs. - legion Archetype-based.
- shipyard Sparse-based.
- specs Bitset-based.
See this repository for information on the different types of ECS (archetype, sparse, bitset).
- glam
- rapier2d / rapier3d New 2D/3D physics framework from the creator of
nphysics2D/nphysics3D. 2D demo and 3D demo. - cgmath
- nalgebra
- ultraviolet
- vek
- yakui Combines a layout model inspired by Flutter with the ease-of-use of an immediate mode UI library like Dear Imgui or egui.
- egui Pure Rust cross-platform library. Many renderers already have an integration with
Egui. - iced Pure Rust cross-platform library.
- imgui Bindings in Rust for the Dear ImGui C++ library.
- fontdue
- swash
- rustybuzz Complete harfbuzz shaping algorithm port to Rust.
- ttf-parser High-level, safe, zero-allocation TrueType font parser.
- rstar N-dimensional r*-tree implementation
- bvh Bounding Volume Hierarchy, built on top of nalgebra.
- kdtree K-dimensional tree in Rust for fast geospatial indexing and nearest neighbors lookup.
- ncollide 2D Bounding Volume Tree implementation (2d documentation).
- ncollide 3D Bounding Volume Tree implementation (3d documentation).
- spade Implements r*-tree and delaunay triangulation.
- flat_spatial Simple flat structures such as a grid/hashmap of cells.
- acacia Generic over the dimension of the partitioned space and thus supports binary trees, quadtrees, octrees, etc.
- tokio Asynchronous TCP and UDP sockets.
- quinn QUIC transport protocol implementation. Built on top of
tokio.
- oddio Built on top of
cpal. - kira Built on top of
cpal. - rodio Built on top of
cpal. - cpal Low-level cross-platform library for audio input and output.
- alto Wrapper for OpenAL.
- openal Wrapper for OpenAL.
- fjall Embedded key-value database in pure Rust.
- redb Embedded key-value database in pure Rust.
- speedy Fast, simple and easy binary serialization.
- serde Serialize and deserialize data structures efficiently and generically.
- serde-json Serialize and deserialize for JSON format. Built on top of
serde. - bincode Serialize and deserialize for binary format. Built on top of
serde. - borsh Implementation of the Borsh (Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing) binary serialization format. It is meant to be used in security-critical projects as it prioritizes consistency, safety, speed, and comes with a strict specification.
- hexasphere Subdivide 3D shapes (icosahedron, tetrahedron, square, triangle, cube) made of triangles.
- navmesh Navigation mesh path-finder.
- density-mesh-core / density-mesh-image Generate 2D mesh from images representing density/height map.
- image Image encoding and decoding for many image formats.
- rayon Introduce parallelism into existing code and guarantees data-race free executions.
- palette Linear color calculations.
- pathfinding Multiple implementations of path-finding algorithms.
- salva2d / salva3d Particle-based fluid dynamics.
- collider Continuous 2D collision detection.