Bevy is a free and open source data-driven game engine written in Rust.

It is built around Bevy ECS - an implementation of the Entity Component System, a relatively new approach to game object representation. An entity is just a number, an identifier for the object; there can then be many components with their own data associated with that number. These would be the fields of a traditional, OOP-style game object. Finally, the behavior of entities with certain components is determined by systems - functions that run each frame and modify these components.

Motivation

I wanted to learn Rust and get myself familiar with OSS development processes. Besides Bevy, I had many other smaller, niche projects in mind that I could contribute to, but Bevy really stood out as a perfect candidate to learn from during this course, the major reason for that being the community around this project.

Work done

I did contribute code to the project: some of it didn't get merged, but some did. One contribution of my was pinning down the reason lighting wouldn't work properly when importing a camera from external format called glTF.

You can the the bug and proper behavior below:

Since it was more of a learning experience for me than anything else, most of my time spent with Bevy was looking at the codebase and reading documentation. I also actively participated in testing, code reviews, and technical discussions. Right now, I am working on a game prototype to be able to learn even more.

Outcomes

Working with this relatively big project resulted in an improvement of my professional skills, expansion of knowledge in the field of graphics, animation, and systems programming, in general.

It also presented me with a few insights into effective project management, whi ch is of greater importance to me. I have abandoned a number of personal projects due to loss of interest after hours of overtime work. Losing focus, or not having one in the first place, was another issue. Working on Bevy on a regular basis, with specific goals in mind has taught me a lot.