Reasons to try to write a game in Rust in 2025

To date, I've made 9 games, all for the 48 hour Ludum Dare game jam. Given the short time allotment, they're of varying quality (although I do really like several of them!) but importantly, they're done.

For the past several years, I've been trying to work on a larger game project which I've referred to as ADVENT. I have a story I'd love to tell in game form, but the sheer complexity of trying to get something together has been overwhelming, and most days I feel too tired to pick it up. I set a goal in 2024 to reach 4 development milestones for the project, and reached 0 of them.

This year, I just want to make things again. Somewhere between a 48 hour game jam on the short end, and the massive Unreal Engine adventure game "life's work" which ADVENT was becoming. Making a game on the order of a few cumulative weeks of work feels more realistic. I hope that getting used to working on (and releasing) smaller projects might help me work up to going back to ADVENT some time in the future.

I'm deciding to try and pick up the Bevy Engine for this purpose. My assumptions (which might not be correct) are:

• Bevy is lighter weight than Unreal Engine or Unity, and will help with the boilerplate while still giving a lot of low level access.
• Rust can offer predictable high performance without fighting a GC (although it will require fighting all sorts of other new and exciting memory management issues).
• Rust can compile binaries for any platforms I may want to run the game on (including mobile and web platforms?)
• Rust offers a lot of programming features I enjoy using and I'll have more fun using it.
• Programming a game instead of learning visual builders or blueprint-style scripting is more suitable for the game I want to make, and I'll enjoy programming it more than those alternatives.

I'd like to revisit those later this year and see if they held true!