James Phillips
Game Play Footage 7/9/25
I am making steady progress in my bevy game. I am still prototyping and getting a feel for basic things. In the clip above you can see all the things I've been able to accomplish. We got a level and some platforms I implemented with skein and some free polygon textures. I didn't do a great job capturing it, but there are also moving platforms that are placed in blender via skein with their movement locations as well.
This is about where skeins usefulness seems to run out for me. There are currently 400 goopers on the screen. When I tried to place those manually in blender, blender crashed. Bevy doesn't give a flying F***k though and can handle this with ease. I haven't found the exact break point for where my fps starts to drop in bevy, but I do know that 400 is fine and 1000 is too much. In blender... I start having issues if I go above 100 goopers. This means that moving forward, static level design will be the scope of skein imports for me and I will use standard bevy gltf imports for my enemies.
I have also implemented some collision detection for my goopers to damage to my player and a fireball (uses imagination) attack that has colliders to damage enemies. To accomplish this we also implemented a simple player and enemy health fields on the respective components. I have also created a simple ui to display the players health. I have an aversion to damage numbers and health bars for enemies in games outside of boss fights. Since I want to put hordes of enemies on screen, I think it will most likely stay rather bare, but I will need to figure out a way to visually indicate to the player the strength of their attacks relative to the enemies health. We have time to figure out the solutions to that one, and as the game takes shape we can contemplate it further.
I do believe in my standard bevy asset implementation I am doing things in a sub optimal way when it comes to spawning and animating my models. The max enemies number may go up with a little research and deepening my understanding of how to be more memory efficient using instancing or some other mechanism I am just fully ignorant of at the moment, I highly doubt I need to spawn an animation player for each individual unit. For now though, optimization isn't a primary concern. I have the door open to make a game with hordes of enemies if that is the path we choose to walk. Being that Vampire Survivors has been routinely played by my children and I, doing a 3d version of does sound fun.
What is my primary concern at the moment? We'll I don't exactly know what kind of game I want to make just yet. I do want to keep tacking together modular systems and to structure my code base in a way that gives me options. Over all I am very happy with the progress I have made.
Outside of coding, I've also spent a good amount of time in blender just trying... not to suck. I have found what will be my workflow for generating assets at the moment. I am going to be focusing on low poly assets, with custom materials made using Ucupaint, and doing simple rigs and animations. This works for now, it gets me things I can use and start designing game play with. My goopers may not be pretty, but hey, they are mine and its a start. They do look like slimes and that's about where the bar needs to be right now. Hopefully as I continue to make simple things I can expand out my skill set and see the quality go up. The shroomer below is the second asset I made and the first I actually hand painted. There are some blemishes, it is not final product quality... but for something that I slapped together in less than a few hours while working at a leisurely pace, I really like it! It gives dream land vibes.
I do want to take a moment to share a few resources. For anyone using Bevy, live in that examples folder! It is invaluable and I appreciate so much that the team has so many examples to use as a starting point for various features. Also I have found the blog tainted coders to be equally invaluable. Some of the posts are for older versions of bevy, but this person really seems to have a deep understanding of the engine and rust and writes extremely clear and concise posts.
bevyengine
