We've started working on our first game! The plan is to design a simple, top-down dungeon crawler similar to Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, and our first effort is to make a prototype game that we're calling Bounty Bros.
Starting with the "CanariPack 8BIT TopDown*"*** art pack by Johan Vinet, we're putting together a small game as a playground for a future commercial game idea. We're building the game with a custom game engine built on top of Bevy.
This custom engine will be a thin layer on top of Bevy designed specifically for making top-down dungeon crawlers. The engine will be Open Source and will be designed to allow anybody to easily bring their own artwork and make a similar game without having to write any Rust code or do much programming. Development of this engine will be done alongside efforts to establish the foundations for Arsenal, helping us get a better understanding how to build Arsenal around Bevy.
We're using this Bounty Bros. project to take our first steps into actually making a real game, while also putting together Open Source tooling and contributing to the Rust gamedev ecosystem.
Already, from this effort, we have produced the ldtk-rs and bevy_ldtk projects which make it easier to use the LDtk map editor inside Bevy or other Rust game engines. We hope that these are just the beginning of the reusable tools that we will be able to contribute the Rust ecosystem.
As we develop our prototype game, we plan on publishing our progress and providing free downloads for it. Our art and assets will remain proprietary, they won't be Open Source, but you will be able to download and play the game for free. And the engine that powers the game will be free and Open Source for you to use on your own game projects!
Video
Without further ado, here's a video of what we've gotten so far!