Comment by diggan

3 days ago

> I've now been coding for like 14 years, and I still haven't done it (besides a number of prototypes). And I'm so burnt out on writing code that I never have the mental energy to push through and get one done.

I was basically the same. Played video games before programming was even on my mind, and first exposure to programming/structured data was trying to mod GTA Vice City vehicles, and then eventually got drawn into programming while trying to game dev by night basically.

On and off I've tried Gamemaker, Unity, Phaser, Godot, Unreal Engine and everything in-between, for the last two decades or something. It always end up the same, game logic so complicated I can't make head or tails of it anymore, and it was really hard to decouple things enough so I could be as confident editing game logic as I am reading/editing other types of codebases.

So I never really got anywhere, until I found Bevy. I'm not particularly fond of Rust, way too verbose and strict for my taste, but ECS turned out to be a god-send for organizing game code (in my case). Suddenly writing decoupled game logic became a breeze, and since discovering Bevy (but really ECS gets most of the credit here), I've even shipped some games during game jams that I'm moderately proud off and placed well in the ranking compared to my expectations.

If you're of similar traits that you need code to be of a certain quality to be able to effectively work with it, ECS might be up your alley too, and worth a try if you haven't already. It made a huge improvement in terms of how flexible the architecture end up being, and made it a lot easier to incrementally work on games.