Welcome, say hello!

[druerridge]

Hey folks!

I’m @druerridge (handle: stopthief), and I work regularly with @andreduvoisin on hobby projects like our first rust game. We both have a number of years working in the games industry professionally, and met each other many years ago while working on a hobby project, an online RTS/MOBA hybrid called The Maestros.

Tragically, neither one of us have made a contribution to a larger open source project before. After looking at and toying around a bit with Amethyst though, we got very excited about the work ya’ll are doing. What’s more, we decided it’d be a great place for us to make our first open source commit. We’re pretty keen on rust and have spent about 100-200 hours in it over 18 months (slowly but surely). We feel like we’re beyond “fighting the borrow checker” phase into the “I built this, but is it rusty?” phase. As such, we are hungry for advice on how to do things in a more “rusty” way, and look forward to the review process!

I was hoping for some help on the process. I saw your “good first issue” tag, and even cracked open a few other issues, but I’m still a little unsure. A) If we find an issue we feel confident in, do we just assign ourselves and start working on a fork? B) Are there other things beyond the “good first issue” stuff that people think it’d be good for us noobs to start contributing? I can’t promise we’ll be pushing quickly, as we only pair-program about 2-3 hours a week. However, we are very consistent at getting things done, and are committed to getting something small all the way through the process.

[jojolepro (Joël Lupien)]

Welcome!

A) If we find an issue we feel confident in, do we just assign ourselves and start working on a fork?

Yes

B) Are there other things beyond the “good first issue” stuff that people think it’d be good for us noobs to start contributing?

You can pretty much take any issue that is not already claimed and that doesn’t have any associated rfc.

Feel free to ask questions on discord, here or on github if you need help!

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Are there other things beyond the “good first issue” stuff that people think it’d be good for us noobs to start contributing?

Our showcase game Evoli can also be a good way to get your feet wet

Evoli is ready for contributions

If you’re not familiar with this project, see our introduction. #showcase:evoli has been open to contributions since its inception, but today we are in a significantly better state of readiness as well. The ease with which we can receive contributions is critical to our success as an official showcase game for Amethyst. In that spirit we’re trying to develop a game project which lets us fearlessly “merge first, ask questions later”. Any testing and subsequent feedback for our different avenues…

[druerridge]

Thank you both, @jojolepro and @erlend_sh for your replies, those were helpful! We may make evoli our first commit because we’re pretty familiar with basic gameplay engineering, though still deciding - we’ll likely begin work in July.

Thanks again!

[eye-jacked (Rob Stuglik)]

Hello everyone,

I’m very inexperienced with programming, never been employed as a programmer, but I’d like to switch over so Im learning Rust on my off time. Amethyst seems like a great way to learn, and I’m happy you’re all here posting.

edit: Im also on the discord

[OvermindDL1]

Huh, no clue how I haven’t spoken here yet… ^.^;

Well I’ve been programming for about 35 years, started with assembly (on commodore systems) and basica (IBM 8088 systems), of course made little tiny games in basica and qbasic as a kid. Eventually hit pascal, then C, then C++ for about a decade, then the Internet came out and started learning about every language I could, C++ remained my love and best language (some of my old code and PR’s still exist in (very-)often-used libraries out). Eventually got jobs doing programming as a side, then my primary work. Currently working in/as I.T./Admin/Teaching at a low-income college as the only programmer for back-end systems here.

Made dozens of game engines for varieties of styles over the past ~25 years, culminated in my main big ECS C++ engine combined from a dozen things (SDL1 with OGL2, eventually SDL2 with OGL4, a horror of an input back-end but it supported even multiple keyboards on windows if you ran it with admin, obviously not recommended, etc…) all glued together with an ECS built up and modified and changed over time, highly scriptable, made lots of little demo games in it, nothing really released short of to close friends (I really really hate releasing unfinished things, or even talking about them, I’ve “mostly” gotten over that in my older age though as my public github slowly grows to a fraction of the size of my old cvs/svn server). I first saw amythest being developed a year (or two?) back and become a bit vocal about pushing certain ECS ideas into it as I wanted Amythest to replace my old C++ engine in capabilities (significant performance and moddability was my goals), unsure how much I actually influenced if any, but it was nice to get things I learned and did from my old engine out into the public. ^.^

/me still thinks Amythest needs an Atom64 type like my old engine had, eases scripting interfaces so much while being fast…

[Moread]

Hi all. I am both a gamer and a nerd. not much to say about me

[biot023]

Hi – I’m currently working (very slowly) on a turn-based strategy game that will be a platform for me to play with evolving a set of AIs for it, mainly.
Then maybe it’ll be nice to make it RTS.
I got into game-related programming years ago by becoming obsessed with artificial life. My experiments have never turned out to be anywhere near as open-ended as I’d hoped, though, so I guess this represents a scaling back of my ambitions in that regard!
I’ve become rather more sceptical of evolving genuinely new behaviour after reading some of David Deutsch’s criticisms of the field so am turning my interest more towards tuning AI for games. And then maybe I’ll build on any successes I have there and launch the singularity a bit later.
I’m really liking the ECS-approach so far, although getting past the various states and prefabs (and particularly the learning curve to understand them) to get into the good stuff is a little frustrating atm – but that is why we persist, is it not?
If someone wanted a gentler slope to learning ECS-style game development, they could start with working through the roguelike tutorial book before the Amethyst docs. It’s a totally different kind of game to the Amethyst example so you get a more fully rounded idea of how an ECS approach could work between them.
Cheers,
Doug.

[kgish (Kiffin Gish)]

Hello everyone! My name is Kiffin and I have spent most of my life (40+ years) in the wonderful world of software development. Now that I have some more time on my hands, I thought that it’d be nice to learn the Rust programming language and hone my skills there by pursuing a life long dream of creating my own future famous game. Rumor has it that Amethyst has much potential, so I figured it’d be an interesting challenge hopping on the band wagon and becoming a more productive human being. As I always say to the younger folk, you’re never too old to learn new stuff.

[VerifiedDingus (Patricia)]

Hi, I’m Patricia (or Patty), and I’m currently teaching myself game development. I’m really new to programming, so no projects under my belt, but I’m determined to learn the ropes and start making games like the ones that inspired me. I know it would probably have been easier to have just downloaded unreal or unity, but I just loved how easy it was to get started with rust compared to other languages, and after learning that amethyst was doing something similar for rust, I just knew I was going to have to get my hands dirty with it. I can’t wait to get to know the folks here and be able to contribute to discussions.

Bonus fun facts about me:
-My favorite game is Fallout: New Vegas (although Mutant Year Zero is currently giving it a run for its caps)
-I’m trans
-I once rocked out so hard at a school dance I tore my ACL

(edit: i forgot to complete my post before sending it. Oops.)

[dougli1sqrd (Eric Douglass)]

Hello!

My name is Eric and I’m a programmer in the Bay Area. I’ve never done any game development really, but have always liked the idea, and I am a fan of rust, even if I feel like an eternal beginner! I thought about playing around with games in rust just as a hobby and a way to get more used to rust and to explore some creativity!

I’m also taking a look at Piston.

I’ve found so far that UI in amethyst is a little confusing and I’m hoping to find some advice or tutorials . Anyway, excited to be here, and looking forward to playing with rust and game development!

Cheers,
Eric

[neosam (Simon Goller)]

Hi!

My name is Simon and I’m a application developer from Munich, Germany. Since I was a kid, I was interested in game development but I nearly never completed anything. The only games I completed were my contributions to Ludum Dare.

Programming in Rust is one of the things I enjoy most in my own time. A while ago, I discovered Amethyst which introduced me into ECS. This was very mind blowing to me and since then I tried to create something playable. Again, I only managed to create a draft game where a women can walk through a randomly generated dungeon. She can cut down bushes as well by pressing space (without an animation). When she touches the hit box of the room exit, another room is loaded. But that’s it. Here is a screenshot so you can get an impression and a link to the repo in case you are interested in the source code.

neosam/sprite-game

Maybe one thing I created for this project could be useful for somebody. It is an exporter for the texture packer which allows to generate the mapping as ron files. The code contains a loader which separates animations and static images in the package and allows to run the animations.

Since I’m very excited about Amethyst, I wanted to be closer to the community and so I finally decided to register here. I think I need to learn a lot and I’m not sure if I followed best practices when developing this game. Maybe, as soon as I get a better understanding, I can help out by contributing code to the Amethyst project.

Cheers

[martinellison (Martin)]

Hello, my name is Martin; I come from Sydney, Australia but now I live in Hong Kong with occasional visits to Shenzhen. I have been an application developer for the past 40 years. I learnt Rust last year and tried to convert a small game to Amethyst. At the time, there wasn’t really enough Amethyst documentation so I put the game on hold; recently, during coronavirus lock-down, I restarted that effort. There are still some areas of Amethyst that I do not understand, but I hope that the community can help me.

[JNissi (Jaakko Nissi)]

Hi! I’m Jaakko¹ from Finland. I live in Klaukkala which is situated in the municipality of Nurmijärvi in southern Finland in pretty much the Helsinki capital region. I’ve been a professional software developer since -98 doing mostly full-stack web² and a bit of android here and there. I’ve been dabbling with game development every now and then, but so far all the frameworks have been badly incompatible with my brain and I haven’t been able to get much further than moving a sprite.

I’ve been learning Rust since late 2016 and since I stumbled upon Amethyst a month or so ago I decided to give game development another go. And boy, am I blown away by how easy it is to get stuff done in Amethyst. I get things moving and shooting and dying in no time at all.

At the moment it seems I might get a small twin-stick shooter game done this year. I have not yet decided if I try to sell it or release open source, so nothing to share for now. If I actually get anywhere with this stuff, I’m definitely going to contribute to the tools and libraries as time permits. Makes sense to give something back when I’m using all free tools (Linux³, Emacs, Blender, Krita, Audacity, Hydrogen, Ardour…)

¹ pronounce my name like Iago (Shakespeare’s Othello or Disney’s Aladdin =D). With the double vowels and double consonants it’s a mouthful for non-Finns. Finns pronounce it exactly as it’s written.

² I started with cgi/C in my first job in 1998-2001. Rust back then would have been heaven.

³ Dual boot since 1998. When I noticed I boot to big W only once in a blue moon and when I do it bluescreens in about 5 min I removed my last Windows installation in 2001. At least initially there will only be a Linux version of any game I manage to write.

I also like footnotes.

[CleanCut (Nathan)]

Hi! I’m Nathan Stocks (@CleanCut on GitHub) . This week I got invited to be a trusted contributor (!!!), and I’m planning to spend more of my free time helping out around Amethyst where I can for a year or two and see what develops. If I’m going to be around helping out more, I thought I better introduce myself!

My dream for Amethyst is for it to be the game engine indie game devs go to when they want a good development experience. I would like to see Amethyst reach a state where folks who don’t know Rust can ship full, commercially viable games, while those who do know Rust can go even further. And I would love to work with a small group of folks who use it to make things people love.

I love Rust. I teach Rust fundamentals courses of various sorts on the side since 2017, mostly at conferences at first, but now primarily online courses. I have also tinkered with being a solo indie game dev for many years. You can probably see how Amethyst is a natural focal point for my interests!

I’m located in Utah, USA. I’ve got a wife and children, which I spend all my time with when I’m not programming (my kids are often around when I am programming, too!). By day, I’m an Engineering Manager of a software team doing backend infrastructure services for a tech company.

[juan-medina]

Hello, I’m Juan Medina, ex-game developer that in my free time still loving coding some games!

I’m learning rust and start playing with Amethyst, so far I really enjoy it.

Here is one of my repos with a C++ game that I was coding in my spare time:

juan-medina/lasers-and-bots

And a video if you like to take a peek :

Lasers And Bots - demo 03

[tigleym (Micah)]

Hi everyone My name is Micah (pronounced “mee-kah”). I was born in Canada and spent most of my life growing up in a smaller city called Lethbridge in the province of Alberta. Almost two years ago I moved to Toronto for my first major software engineering position and have been here since.

I started learning Rust back in 2017 and have been learning it on the side since. I have always been interested in getting into game development but was always intimidated by the large ecosystem and steep learning curve. A few months ago I found Amethyst and decided to give learning Rust and game development a shot! I loved how easy it was to get something started and have been able to start a personal sprite animations project because of it.

Hopefully, I can give back to the community to show my appreciation for the amount of work and dedication that’s been put into this project. It rocks!

[mrhatman]

Hello Everyone, My name is Lucas ( mrhatman on github). I am from the US and I work as an embedded engineer. I first learn rust as part of a hackathon and just though it was exactly what we needed in a systems language.

I have been interested in video games from a young age and as I pursued programming I continued to create small games and build game from scratch and eventually small engines but I never got far. I am excited to continue my development of this engine.

[piotrek (Piotr)]

Hi everyone! My name is Peter and I’m from Poland. I work at the company mainly focused on signal processing to deliver high-quality entertainment I’m interested in a/v processing and electronics. In my free time, I like to make music and create sound effects and do some rock climbing.

I love game jams and I will definitely use Amethyst on the next one!

[HaNaK0 (Hampus)]

Hi!

My name is Hampus, I’m an engineering student from sweden who used to work for a larger game company but decided I wanted to learn more. I like scouting, playing video games, coding, and playing music.

The reason i ran in to amethyst was becuase I wanted to learn Rust and one of the better ways to learn a language is to have a project in it. So my plan was to write a Minesweeper clone and when i search for rust game engines I found amethyst.