Rust Game Dev Revolution

Rust has been quietly revolutionizing game development with its blend of C/C++-level performance and modern safety guarantees. In recent years, an active community has built up an ecosystem of game engines and libraries (like Bevy, macroquad, ggez, Fyrox, and more) that make it easier to create games in Rust. Developers are increasingly drawn to Rust’s reliability – memory safety without a garbage collector – and its fearless concurrency, which are ideal for high-performance games (Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing | Hacker News). The ecosystem isn’t as mature as Unity or Unreal, but it’s growing fast. In fact, “Rust is shaping up to be a major game programming language” as one observer noted (Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing | Hacker News), with an abundance of community-made crates for common needs (from gamepad input to sprite loading) ready to be pulled in (The State of Game Dev in Rust 2024: A Newcomer's Perspective : r/rust_gamedev). To see what Rust is capable of in game development, let’s look at two trending projects that showcase its strengths.

(File:Veloren Savannah Screenshot.jpg - Wikimedia Commons) Veloren’s voxel world spans diverse biomes and vast distances, demonstrating Rust’s ability to handle large-scale 3D environments. Veloren is a free, open-source action-adventure RPG set in a limitless, procedurally generated fantasy world (Veloren: An Open-Source A Voxel RPG Adventure | by C. L. Beard | ILLUMINATION | Medium) (Veloren: An Open-Source A Voxel RPG Adventure | by C. L. Beard | ILLUMINATION | Medium). Inspired by classics like Cube World and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it drops players into a voxel (3D pixel) universe teeming with exploration and combat. This ambitious project is entirely written in Rust and has its own custom game engine built from scratch (Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing | Hacker News) – a testament to Rust’s low-level power. The development is community-driven and collaborative: it’s released under GPL3 with original graphics, music, and assets created by volunteers, and anyone can dive into the code or contribute to its world (Veloren: An Open-Source A Voxel RPG Adventure | by C. L. Beard | ILLUMINATION | Medium). The source repository is open to all, which has attracted dozens of contributors and an enthusiastic player community over the years.

Some of Veloren’s key features give a sense of its scope and the tech behind it:

• Vast Procedural World: The game generates enormous, varied biomes – mountains, deserts, jungles, and more – that players are free to explore at will (Veloren). The world is fully simulated as you play, with day/night cycles, weather, and ecosystems.

• Dynamic Combat and RPG Elements: It offers fast-paced combat with many different weapons and play styles, plus character progression through gear crafting and stat improvements. Towns populated by NPCs allow crafting equipment and trading, adding RPG depth (Veloren).

• Dungeons, Bosses and Quests: Adventurers will encounter menacing bosses and monsters in dungeons, hideouts, and other points of interest scattered across the world (Veloren). Seasonal events (like special Halloween or Christmas content) keep the world feeling alive (Lots of exciting updates coming to the free & open source RPG Veloren | GamingOnLinux).

• Resource Gathering and Crafting: Players can mine ore and gems deep in sprawling cave networks beneath the earth (Veloren), then use those resources to craft better gear or potions. Food can be gathered and even farming is planned, making for a robust survival gameplay element.

• Taming and Companions: A fun touch – you can tame wild beasts to serve as companions or mounts, whether it’s a trusty horse or more exotic creatures (Veloren).

• Multiplayer and Servers: Veloren supports online multiplayer; you can team up on public servers or host your own world for friends (Veloren). The networking code (written in Rust, of course) is performant and continually improving, aiming to handle many players in a shared world.

Under the hood, Veloren leverages cutting-edge Rust technology. It uses wgpu (Rust’s implementation of the WebGPU standard) for rendering, which allows it to target modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12 with graceful fallback to OpenGL 3.3 for older hardware (Lots of exciting updates coming to the free & open source RPG Veloren | GamingOnLinux). This means players with high-end machines enjoy optimized visuals, while those on older PCs can still run the game – a flexibility that would be tricky without a multi-backend graphics library. Veloren’s engine architecture follows an entity-component-system (ECS) design (common in Rust gamedev), enabling efficient game logic updates even as the world simulation grows. The project’s maintainers write bi-weekly dev blogs (“This Week in Veloren”) detailing new features and optimizations, which shows the community’s commitment to continuous improvement. Recent updates have brought things like better world generation, improved AI for mobs, new biomes (e.g. mesa cliffs), and performance boosts across the board (Lots of exciting updates coming to the free & open source RPG Veloren | GamingOnLinux) (Lots of exciting updates coming to the free & open source RPG Veloren | GamingOnLinux). It’s truly amazing how quickly this game is evolving, powered by Rust’s fearless concurrency (for handling world ticks and networking in parallel) and memory safety (preventing crashes as contributors add features).

Why does Veloren matter? In short, it’s become a flagship example of Rust in gaming. The project proves that a passionate open-source community can build a complex 3D MMORPG-style game in Rust without sacrificing performance or stability. For programmers, Veloren’s codebase is a goldmine of learning – from graphics rendering techniques to multiplayer server architecture – all in idiomatic Rust. It showcases how Rust’s strengths (safety, speed, portability) translate into a living, breathing game world. Veloren lowers the barrier for future Rust game developers by sharing not just code but also lessons learned via documentation and blogs. If you’re interested in Rust for game dev, Veloren invites you to peek under the hood (and even contribute) (Veloren: An Open-Source A Voxel RPG Adventure | by C. L. Beard | ILLUMINATION | Medium). It stands as proof that “Rust gaming is picking up” and can deliver experiences on par with games made in more established engines (Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing | Hacker News).

(I built a castle and village in Tiny Glade yesterday. The images below are all from the same Tiny Glade, and all this took me about 12 hours : r/CozyGamers) Tiny Glade offers a serene, richly-detailed diorama building experience where players construct charming medieval scenes at their own pace. In this cozy sandbox builder, there are no enemies, no resource grind, and no time pressure – just creativity and relaxation. Players can doodle whimsical castles, cottages, and romantic ruins on a grassy landscape, and the game’s procedural magic automatically adorns your creations with little details like arched bridges, mossy stones, and lantern-lit windows (Tiny Glade on Steam). You don’t have to worry about grids or alignment; Tiny Glade’s free-form building “explore[s] gridless building chemistry”, letting you draw walls and watch them intelligently curve and connect into picturesque structures (Tiny Glade on Steam). In other words, it takes care of the fiddly bits, so you can focus on designing that perfect fairy-tale village or hidden hamlet by a pond. It even allows hopping down into first-person mode to stroll through your creation and admire it from the ground, which really brings your little castles to life (Tiny Glade - Wikipedia).

Tiny Glade gained massive attention in the indie community throughout 2024 – and interestingly, it’s built in Rust. Developed by the two-person team Pounce Light from Sweden, the game started as a weekend experiment in procedural wall-building using the Rust-powered Bevy engine (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games). The developers, Anastasia Opara and Tomasz Stachowiak, chose Rust because they were already fans of the language in their day jobs, and they found it “simple to mix and match components” when prototyping the game (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games). They utilized Bevy’s ECS (Entity Component System) for the game logic – benefiting from Bevy’s ergonomic, data-driven approach – but they didn’t shy away from rolling up their sleeves to implement custom rendering tech where needed. In fact, Tiny Glade quietly boasts one of the most advanced real-time global illumination (GI) lighting systems shipping in any game today, all custom-built for this project (Tiny Glade 'built' its way to >600k sold in a month | Hacker News). Stachowiak, having led a groundbreaking GI research project at Embark Studios previously, brought his expertise to Tiny Glade’s engine. The result is a lighting pipeline that produces incredibly soft, natural light and shadows in the game’s idyllic scenes – from sun rays that realistically bounce off stone walls to the warm glow of windows at dusk – giving Tiny Glade a distinct, almost painterly look. This level of technical artistry is rare in indie games, and it’s powered by Rust’s ability to integrate low-level graphics code (the GI system is essentially a bespoke renderer written in Rust) with high-level gameplay code (the building logic in Bevy). As the devs put it, “Rust and Bevy are perfect here because they give us the precision we need to engineer everything the way it needs to work without any…crashes.” (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games) Even with all this custom tech, the game has been rock-solid stable – a credit to Rust’s memory safety.

Beyond its technical merits, Tiny Glade has proven that there’s a real audience for Rust-based games. When the developers launched a free demo during Steam Next Fest in mid-2024, it blew up: Tiny Glade amassed over 800,000 wishlists on Steam before release and became one of the most downloaded and watched demos of the festival (Tiny Glade - Wikipedia). Players fell in love with the concept and the beautiful visuals (the “overwhelmingly positive” Steam reviews speak for themselves (Tiny Glade - Wikipedia)). By the time it fully released in September 2024, Tiny Glade was a hit in the cozy game niche, showing that even a small Rust project can achieve commercial success. This project matters for Rust developers because it exemplifies how Rust can be used in a hybrid approach: leveraging an existing engine (Bevy) for speed of development, but extending or replacing parts of it (rendering, procedural generation) when you need ultimate control. The Tiny Glade team has discussed how Bevy gave them a great starting point as “the biggest Rust-powered engine,” but they weren’t afraid to push beyond its built-in capabilities with their own solutions (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games). In doing so, they demonstrated a key strength of Rust’s gamedev ecosystem – its modularity. You’re not locked into a black box; you can swap in your own systems (renderers, physics, etc.) or integrate with other libraries thanks to Rust’s flexible architecture. Other developers can certainly learn from Tiny Glade’s example: it’s possible to achieve AAA-like graphics and polish with a tiny team in Rust, as long as you’re willing to innovate. And the payoff isn’t just technical – it’s emotional. Tiny Glade has touched players by providing a stress-free creative outlet, and it shows Rust can deliver not only performance, but also delightful gameplay experiences.

Both Veloren and Tiny Glade showcase the capabilities of Rust in game development, albeit in very different ways. Veloren demonstrates Rust’s strength in building large, complex systems: an entire MMORPG-style world with server-client networking, heavy 3D computation, and a sprawling codebase managed by dozens of contributors. Despite that complexity, Rust’s safety guarantees (and fearless refactoring via the compiler’s checks) help keep the project maintainable and relatively bug-free – there’s a reason Veloren can update every two weeks with new features without constantly breaking. Tiny Glade, on the other hand, shows Rust’s versatility and innovation on a small-scale project: by combining an off-the-shelf framework (Bevy ECS) with bespoke engine parts, two developers created a unique game that rivals big-budget titles in graphics quality. This mix-and-match approach is something Rust enables particularly well (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games) (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games), thanks to its modular ecosystem of crates and the absence of a forced “engine monopoly.”

For programmers eyeing Rust for gamedev, these projects offer a few key takeaways:

• Performance without Fear: Rust gives you performance close to C/C++ but with memory safety. In Veloren, this means the team can push the envelope with huge worlds and concurrent systems (rendering, AI, physics running in parallel) without worrying about hard-to-debug crashes or memory leaks. As one Veloren developer noted, Rust lets them write a game server and client with confidence (Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing | Hacker News) – an important point for online games.

• Community and Open Development: Both projects illustrate the power of community in Rust. Veloren’s open-source nature invites learning and contributions, creating a positive feedback loop of improvement. Tiny Glade engaged its player community early with demos, and even though its code isn’t open, the developers have been transparent about their process (giving interviews about using Bevy/Rust (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games) (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games)). The Rust gamedev community is very supportive and knowledge-sharing, so embracing open development (or at least open communication) can accelerate a project’s growth.

• Modern Engine Design: Rust encourages an ECS-centric design (as seen in Bevy and Veloren’s engine). This teaches developers to think in terms of data and composition, which tends to scale well for games. Learning to build a game in Rust often means learning a new, more data-driven way to architect game logic – a skill that can make your code cleaner and more efficient. It’s telling that even outside Rust, ECS is gaining popularity; Rust just happens to have it in its DNA from the start.

• Innovation through Integration: Perhaps the biggest lesson is that Rust lets you integrate low-level innovations easily. Want to incorporate a cutting-edge lighting system? Rust allows that, as Tiny Glade proved with its custom GI. Want to reimplement a classic game for modern platforms? Rust is doing that too – e.g., the open-source doukutsu-rs project faithfully remakes the Cave Story engine in Rust (doukutsu-rs - GitHub). The language doesn’t constrain you to pre-made solutions; you can dig deeper when needed, or use convenient libraries when they suffice. This flexibility means developers can be more creative and ambitious with their game’s tech.

In summary, Rust is coming into its own in the game development world. Veloren and Tiny Glade are two standout examples – one an expansive open-world RPG, the other a focused creative sandbox – that have recently captured the community’s attention. They show that Rust can deliver games that are not only fun and beautiful, but also robust and innovative under the hood. Whether you’re intrigued by Veloren’s massive open world (and perhaps inspired to contribute to an open-source game), or excited by Tiny Glade’s marriage of cozy gameplay with hardcore graphics programming, one thing is clear: Rust has opened up new possibilities in how we create games. The Rust gamedev journey is still young, but with each successful project, it’s forging a path toward a future where we’ll see more and more games – from indie darlings to possibly even AAA titles – proudly powered by Rust. If you’re a programmer interested in game development, now is a great time to dive in and explore Rust’s growing game engines and communities. As these projects show, there’s a lot we can learn, and a lot we can build, with Rust. Happy coding, and happy gaming!

Sources:

1. Brett Chalupa, “The State of Game Dev in Rust 2024,” rust_gamedev Reddit (The State of Game Dev in Rust 2024: A Newcomer's Perspective : r/rust_gamedev) (Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing | Hacker News).

2. Veloren Official Website – Feature List (Veloren) (Veloren).

3. C.L. Beard, “Veloren: An Open-Source Voxel RPG Adventure,” ILLUMINATION (Medium) (Veloren: An Open-Source A Voxel RPG Adventure | by C. L. Beard | ILLUMINATION | Medium) (Veloren: An Open-Source A Voxel RPG Adventure | by C. L. Beard | ILLUMINATION | Medium).

4. Veloren 0.15 Release Announcement, Hacker News Discussion (Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing | Hacker News).

5. GamingOnLinux – Veloren Update Feb 2024 (Lots of exciting updates coming to the free & open source RPG Veloren | GamingOnLinux) (Lots of exciting updates coming to the free & open source RPG Veloren | GamingOnLinux).

6. Steam Store Page – Tiny Glade (Description & Reviews) (Tiny Glade on Steam) (Tiny Glade - Wikipedia).

7. 80.lv Interview – Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy & Proceduralism (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games) (Tiny Glade Developers on Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games).

8. Hacker News – Tiny Glade 600k Sales Discussion (Tiny Glade 'built' its way to >600k sold in a month | Hacker News).

9. Fish Folk: Jumpy (Fish Fight) – GitHub README (GitHub - fishfolk/jumpy: Tactical 2D shooter in fishy pixels style. Made with Rust-lang and Bevy ) (GitHub - fishfolk/jumpy: Tactical 2D shooter in fishy pixels style. Made with Rust-lang and Bevy ) (example of Rust+Bevy 2D game).

10. doukutsu-rs (Cave Story Rust remake) – GitHub project description (doukutsu-rs - GitHub).