Snake

2025-04-07

Continuing Rust practice by creating a Snake clone with Bevy.

Links:

• Bevy
• Source Code

# Game

Use WASD or arrow keys to control.

# Thoughts on Bevy

I'm not terribly familiar with the Entity Component System approach to games and I feel like I might not have used it as effectively as I could have. In the end I ended up with a large Game resource that kept track of collision data, snake position, and movement directions. This feels somewhat like it's working against the system rather than tracking those properties as components within the snake entity. This approach also meant that I made minimal use of the Query APIs since nearly everything I needed to work with was accessible right in the Game resource.

I liked the ability to define an enum to represent different game states. Coupled with the ability to spawn entities as StateScoped, this made it really easy to transition between the title screen and game screen without having to worry about any manual cleanup.

I also appreciated the support for grouping things across the API. Components can be grouped into Bundles. Systems (and many other things) can be grouped into Plugins. These features seem like they provide a clear path for wrangling the complexity as a project grows.

Overall I would definitely consider using it again. I'd like to give the ECS approach another try with a different game.

# Output File Sizes

If I had to pick something to complain about, it would have to be the size of the output files when compiling to wasm. The documentation has some helpful pointers for this though that seemed to work fairly well.

Here are the sizes I ended up with trying the different recommendations. The lto = true setting did more than double the compile time, but the space savings still seem worth it for producing the release build.