GIGF25 & Bevy's 5th birthday
This last weekend had both the Glasgow1 Independent Games Festival – which I'd been looking forward to since its first iteration last year – and the 5th birthday for Bevy, the game engine I've been using and intermittently, lightly contributing to over the ~10 months.
Glasgow Independent Games Festival 2025
The 2024 GIGF left me giddy and resolute in the underdog position that is "some nobody who wants games to not be 'Better' but to be more DIY, more personal, visceral, and avant garde." I love small games that tell personal stories, I love weird games that make people angry about their lack of adherence to what games "should be", I love experiments that have been tapped to be presented to a wider audience, I love presentations of less corporate, more artistic, personal, and philosophical thought put on stage in front of Hard-Boiled Industry Professionals and seeing who gets their Glitch in the Matrix (my "be pretentious! music scenes, hegelian dialectics, and games" talk write-up-as-a-blog-post is still in drafts, sorry!).
This year's GIGF was much larger than last year's. I think at least twice the number of games and about 3-4 times the attendees. I went to as many talks as I could and I played as many games as I could and spoke to as many people as I could and yet there still was not enough time. Many games, friends, and presentations slipped by me.
The game that struck me the most was "I write games not tragedies" – an "emo cringefest" with a lot of heart. I am mentioning Asterism2 here because when I re-read through this post in future I want to either have finished playing it or be reminded that I should. The talk I enjoyed the most was Stanley Baxton's "Worldbuilding through Negative Space": a treatise on building one's worlds and stories in ways that mirror the fallibility of real-world imperfect information, real-world history of history. But every talk I went to was really good, I just wish there was more space in the venue. Every signup sheet I saw filled up quickly and every talk had to turn eager listeners away.
Bevy
Bevy is an ECS game engine, it's written in a programming language. People use it to build things, of which some of those things are games. I'm using it, there are parts of it I enjoy and parts I do not. Generally, it's made my current project less of a pain in the most technically annoying areas. I've also enjoyed getting to know-at-some-level the people who regularly contribute, and finding ways I could contribute (if at all).
Contributing to Technical Writing
A few months ago my "Explaining Examples" technical writing spec got merged, as have a few explanations I wrote. I have some mixed feelings on this, and if I pluck at one thread I might come away with "I think it could have used another couple of feedback & editing passes." But I'm not certain how much of that is echos of past perfectionism vs how the technical spec has been deployed in practice. Regardless, I am grateful it was merged.
I think there's a lot of useful space in Bevy for this mid-length kind of technical writing/teaching material. What's hard to get going, as with any other social project, is other people's time and enthusiasm.
Bevy Scene Notation
I still feel that so much of the developer experience being focused on the programmer gets in the way of doing more focused design work. This is changing, and I am happy that it is changing, but it's changing slow enough that it's affecting what I can and cannot build. Architecture affects that which can be expressed, even if the ways it effects these things are unpredictable.
Bevy Scene Notation, aka BSN, promises the bridge to design tooling. Design tooling that lets people work on scenes, ui, prefabs, "collections of entities and their relationships" will mean this is no longer an engine that is as arcane to non-programmers or the programming-avoidant. I am excited about this, but I also know we're a long way from this being truly the case.
If I could spend all my time on Bevy (the engine) I'd be spending it doing what I can to develop in-editor tools for making basic drawing, writing, animating, or sound design in a future Bevy editor possible. Or I'd be making as many write-ups of the bevy examples as I could. Anything to solve the "blank page" problem that gets in the way of curious newcomers, hobbyists, and people who are primarily artists. But my words are cheap, and dreams grow easily.
Bevy for late 2025/26
I continue to spend a lot of my time working on Rare Episteme | Museum of Dead Card Games. Logos, steam capsule assets, a store page, etc. are currently on my docket. I'm looking forward to being on the other side of it. It's a Bevy game, and I've been working on it for way too long. Playtests have gone well, but I still want to see what more people will make of it.
If I can carve out some time, and after 0.17 releases, I'd like to get a more concerted effort (maybe a short-lived working group?) on Example Explanations so that more examples are more accessible to more people on a conceptual level. There's a couple of things that might need to change first, like privacy-preserving analytics on what examples are looked at the most, but I'm not really too invested in that. I mostly want to try to pull some other people in to see if the spec holds up to other people's eyes and keyboards in the field.
GIGF26
I really hope there's a GIGF26. I'm very lucky to have indie development communities be a part of my life, and I want to see them continue to grow, spread, flourish in grassroots ways. Punk is alive and she's gouging out my heart with her experimental video game projects.
Next year I want to see some more local projects, and some more things that are illegible as games (this year had a fair few!). And a larger talks venue. Maybe a bit better planning on my part, too.
Bevy of the Future
I want Bevy-the-editor to end up accessible as a general, performant Interactive-Art3 Suite that doesn't inherit the issues of 'we're just a browser' or the confusion of OOP architecture. Or, at least the foundations of one. Something not too far from it, maybe a handful of extensions or plugins or Doodle Studio 95s away from something like that. I'm looking forward to being "out of the woods" with respect to code being the core focus of the development experience. The likelihood of this is low, but it is what I dream about.
In my heart I want to see bevy games turn up in weird art portals online and occupy artsy essays, to turn up at events like GIGF without anyone batting an eye, the engine being something that enabled these things without being the main talking point. It's not like this isn't already the case, but it's still where my values are. There's big-ticket "real modern engine" features on the horizon (as well as many that already exist) but I'm more interested in what people make with it, reducing the filters that keep people from making cool shit.
I truly think the foundations are there to make a lot of game development more accessible by keeping the number of framework concepts someone needs to understand low-ish4, making complexity not explode under every new user-driven change / addition, having dependencies be reliable, and reducing the ways inexperienced gamedevs can sabotage their own projects without realising. But I don't think we're there yet. I do think we can get there. I'm looking forward to things getting there.
Not all the games are from glasgow, the event just happens to be there!↩
The developer for this one also gave a really enjoyable talk on crafts & stop-motion wrt assets. The presentation was itself a scene in the game, that got me.↩
As opposed to Blender, which is very much a non-interactive art suite. Think flash, not greasepencil.↩
Everything as entities! Or everything as components on entities, depending on how you slice it.↩