ggez is a Rust library to create a Good Game Easily.
More specifically, ggez is a lightweight game framework for making 2D games with minimum friction. It aims to implement an API based on (a Rustified version of) the LÖVE game framework. This means it will contain basic and portable 2D drawing, sound, resource loading and event handling.
ggez is not meant to be everything to everyone, but rather a good base upon which to build. Thus it takes a fairly batteries-included approach without needing a million additions and plugins for everything imaginable, but also does not dictate higher-level functionality such as physics engine or ECS. Instead the goal is to allow you to use whichever libraries you want to provide these functions, or build your own libraries atop ggez.
- Filesystem abstraction that lets you load resources from folders or zip files
- Hardware-accelerated rendering engine built on the
gfx-rsgraphics engine - Playing and loading .ogg, .wav and .flac files via the
rodiocrate - TTF font rendering with
rusttype, as well as bitmap fonts - Interface for handling keyboard and mouse events easily through callbacks
- Config file for defining engine and game settings
- Easy timing and FPS measurement functions
ggez is built on the latest stable Rust compiler and distributed on
crates.io. To include it in your project, just add the dependency
line to your Cargo.toml file:
ggez = "0.3"
However you also need to have the SDL2 libraries installed on your system. The best way to do this is documented by the SDL2 crate.
ggez consists of three main parts: A Context object which contains
all the state required to interface with the computer's hardware, an
EventHandler trait that the user implements to register callbacks for
events, and various sub-modules such as graphics and audio that
provide the functionality to actually get stuff done.
See the examples/ directory in the source. hello_world is exactly
what it says. imageview is a simple program that shows off a number
of features such as sound and drawing. astroblasto is a small
but complete Asteroids-like game.
To run the examples, you have to tell your program where to find the
resources directory included in the git repository. The easy way is
to enable cargo-resource-root flag to tell ggez to look for a
resources directory next to your Cargo.toml, or copy or symlink
the resources directory to a place the running game can find it
(such as next to the game executable).
cargo run --example astroblasto --features=cargo-resource-root
Either way, if it can't find the resources it will give you an error
along the lines of ResourceNotFound("'resources' directory not found! Should be in "/home/foo/src/ggez/target/debug/resources").
Just copy or symlink the resources/ directory to where the error says it's
looking.
ggez is built upon SDL2 for windowing and events, rodio for sound,
and a 2D drawing engine implemented in gfx using the OpenGL backend
(which currently defaults to use OpenGL 3.2). It should be
entirely thread-safe outside of the basic event-handling loop, and
portable to Windows, Linux and Mac.
The goal is to eventually have ggez be pure Rust, but we're not there
yet. There's some blockers before we can drop SDL2 for
glutin, see the issue tracker for more info.