Bevy just released their version 0.11, so I figured it would be a nice opportunity to ask the Tildes gamedevs if they were using it :)

Bevy is a rust game engine - more like a set of libraries actually - that's been gaining popularity the last few years. It has become the de facto toolset if you want to make a game in rust. It is very opinionated towards Entity-Component-System (ECS), and uses the pattern to facilitate parallelism and multi-threading.

Personally, I'm using the bevy-ecs lib (not the whole engine) to write a roguelike and hone my skills in rust. I enjoy it but it's not really beginner-friendly. The official docs are lacking, and you'll have to dig in the auto-generated api docs to make the most out of it. However, I appreciate that each release not only brings new features, but also refines existing ones. The engine is getting better - not only bigger - release after release.

A couple of years ago I had the itch for a 3D platformer and didn't feel like replaying Super Mario 64 for the nth time. I saw that there was a game called Poi and it was clearly inspired by SM64. I picked it up and played it while it was in early access.

I enjoyed my time with it, but because the game wasn't content and feature complete, I ended up making my way through an unfinished, buggy version. This is not a complaint, as I knew well that it was still in development, but I can't deny that it hampered my enjoyment of the final product. When I finally sat down to play through the game for the "first" time after its release, my previous experience soured my current one because I was retreading familiar, albeit improved, levels.

Distance, another early access game I purchased, released in full this past month. Unlike with Poi, I actually stopped myself from playing Distance in early access (after trying it out briefly), so that I wouldn't ruin the game for myself. As such, my enjoyment of it has been far greater. Those two games, plus a handful of others, have made it such that I pretty much will no longer buy a game if it's in early access, simply because I'd rather wait for the full thing.

With that in mind, I'm curious if other people do the same thing, or if some people actually like the behind the scenes experience of playing a game as it gets built? Also, what are some early access success stories that have had solid, full releases? What are some that would be considered successes in spite of the fact that they haven't fully released yet?