What is this?

ggez is a Rust library to create a Good Game Easily.

More specifically, ggez is a lightweight cross-platform 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 contains basic and portable 2D drawing, sound, resource loading and event handling, but finer details like performance characteristics may be very different (e.g. ggez does not do automatic batching).

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 entity component system. Instead the goal is to allow you to use whichever libraries you want to provide these functions, or build your own libraries atop ggez.

Features

• Filesystem abstraction that lets you load resources from folders or zip files
• Hardware-accelerated 2D rendering built on the gfx-rs graphics engine
• Loading and playing .ogg, .wav and .flac files via the rodio crate
• 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.
• Math integration with nalgebra
• Some more advanced graphics options: shaders, sprite batches and render targets

Supported platforms

• Fully supported: Windows, Linux, macOS
• Work in progress: Web/WASM/Emscripten
• Not officially supported yet (but maybe you can help!): Android, iOS

For details, see docs/BuildingForEveryPlatform.md

Who's using ggez?

Check out the projects list!

Usage

ggez requires rustc >= 1.25.0 and distributed on crates.io. To include it in your project, just add the dependency line to your Cargo.toml file:

ggez = "0.4"

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. The general pattern is to create a struct holding your game's data which implements the EventHandler trait. Create a new Context object with default objects from a ContextBuilder or Conf object, and then call event::run() with the Context and an instance of your EventHandler to run your game's main loop.

Getting started

For a quick tutorial on ggez, see the Hello ggez guide in the docs/ directory.

Examples

See the examples/ directory in the source. Most examples show off a single feature of ggez, while astroblasto is a small but complete Asteroids-like game.

To run the examples, just check out the source and execute cargo run --example in the root directory:

cargo run --example astroblasto

If this doesn't work, see the FAQ for solutions to common problems.

Implementation details

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.

Help!

Sources of information:

• The FAQ has answers to common questions and problems.
• The API docs, a lot of design stuff is explained there.
• Check out the examples.

If you still have problems, feel free to open an issue or say hi in the #rust-gamedev IRC channel on the irc.mozilla.org server.