Building Fyrox: A Rust Game Engine (with Dmitry Stepanov)

To kick off 2025 we’re looking at Fyrox a game engine built in Rust, largely by one person - Dmitry Stepanov. For an individual project, it’s covered an incredible amount of ground, covering the rendering and animation features you’d expect from a game engine, with some features that might surprise you - like Rust scripting support with hot-reloading.

As we dive into Fyrox, Dmitry explains what it takes to build a game engine, why he chose Rust (and why he’s happy with the choice), and how one person can hope to build a project of that size.

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Fyrox Homepage: https://fyrox.rs/
The Fyrox Book: https://fyrox-book.github.io/
Rapier Physics Engine: https://rapier.rs/
The Mine (on Steam): https://store.steampowered.com/app/898980/The_Mine/
Dmitry’s Engine: https://github.com/mrDIMAS/DmitrysEngine
GJK Collision Detection Algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert%E2%80%93Johnson%E2%80%93Keerthi_distance_algorithm
WPF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation
PICO-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/
Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins

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0:00 Intro
2:12 Why Build A Game Engine?
7:18 Dmitry's Industry Experience
11:19 Why Choose Rust?
15:52 Where Do You Start On A Game Engine?
22:35 Does OO Fit With Rust?
32:37 How Are Components Written?
39:13 Hot-Reloading Rust Code
49:13 Write From Scratch vs. Use A Library
56:24 The Engine's GUI Toolkit
1:02:15 Are UIs Harder Than Rendering?
1:10:25 How Long Did Hot Reloading Take To Get Right?
1:14:37 How Do You Add Reflection To Rust?
1:20:12 Building A Game Engine As A (Mostly) Solo Project
1:22:52 Where's Fyrox Now, Where's It Going?
1:28:05 Writing the Fyrox Book
1:32:40 How Is Fyrox Supported?
1:42:21 Outro