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Best Golang Libraries For Game Development

Software, Programming. 

Game development with Golang is gaining prominence these days. Developers are looking at the programming language beyond the purpose of back-end development, systems programming, etc. And all this is possible due to the availability of several gaming libraries and engines.

If you love designing games, then this blog is the perfect read for you. Here, you will get to know about the best libraries that you can use. 

 

Leaf

  • Leaf is a practical game server framework written in Golang and is very easy to use. It is an open-source server that is aimed at boosting the efficiency in runtime as well as development. 
  • The server framework offers multi-core support. It helps in keeping side effects at bay while using the CPU resources at maximum, with the help of leaf/go and modules. 
  • The module based server framework is also self-healing. Instead of letting the process crash, Leaf always attempts to fix runtime issues. 
  • If you develop games using Leaf, it is wise if you do not use too many modules like LeafServer. Separate goroutines are assigned for each module and the communication between modules take place via RPC channel, which is lightweight. 

 

Ebitengine

  • Looking forward to developing simple 2D games and deploying them on different platforms? Then open-source game library Ebitengine is the perfect choice for you. 
  • You have several input options like keyboard, mouse, touches, gamepads, etc. And you have audio options like PCM, WAV, MP3, Vorbis/Ogg. 
  • The 2D graphics is awesome as you get access to various composition modes, text and offscreen rendering, custom shaders, color and geometry transformation by matrices, and automatic batches. 
  • You also get to use packages like vector, text, mobile, ebitenutil, inpuutil, etc. The library has been used to create production-level games like Bear’s Restaurant, 2048, Blocks, Flappy, etc. 

 

GoWorld 

  • GoWorld is a distributed game server engine that comes with scalability and Hot Reload features in Golang. This allows you to use more than one machine to enhance the server capacity. You can update the gaming logic with a simple restart of the server process. 
  • With AOI support, you can manage multiple entities and spaces. Since the server has an entity framework, the various entities can access attributes or call methods to visit each other. 
  • The server allows you to swap a game if you send SIGHUP to a process. And then you have to restart the process with parameter -restore. This attribute helps you to update server-side logic or take care of server bugs. 
  • The picture below depicts the architecture of the GoWorld engine server. 

(Source: GitHub - xiaonanln/goworld: Scalable Distributed Game Server Engine with Hot Swapping in Golang)

 

Nano

  • Nano is deemed as a Pure Go game server framework that can also be used for web application development in real-time. 
  • If you wish to make a distributed game server without hassle, then you should use Nano which contains solutions for built-in distributed systems. 
  • The Nano application essentially represents the Component collection, which is a set of Handlers. It is designed in such a way that it helps the developers avoid repetitive work, like network related programming. 
  • The application allows you to carry out any operation in the component. You can even start a collection of Nano applications to convey messages to the backend servers. 

 

G3n

  • G3n is an open-source game engine written in Golang. The 3D engine is cross platform as well, which means you write the code once and run it on Linux, macOS and Windows. 
  • If you wish to run the engine, you would need Go 1.8+ and GCC compatible C compiler and OpenGL driver. You can use the distribution package manager to install C libraries on Unix-based systems. 
  • You get access to several features like real-time lighting, hierarchical scene graphs, 3D spatial audio (OpenAL), TrueType font support, animation framework, physics engine, geometry generators, etc. 
  • G3n was used to design the 3D puzzle game Gokoban. It allows you to control the Go gopher, and there are several levels for which you have to accomplish certain tasks. 

(Source: g3n - Go 3D Game Engine)

 

Oak 

  • If you do not have a C compiler installed on your system, and you wish to create a functional game, then Oak is the best engine to resort to. 
  • The 2D Physics System offers physics manipulation and vector types. You also get access to R-Tree bifurcated from rtreego, collision spaces and 2D Raycasting. 
  • As part of the Image rendering, you have several built-in Renderable types that cover Sequence, Switch, Composite, Sprite. You get primitive builders like Bezier, Line, Colorbox. 
  • With Oak, you get impressive windows management as you can run multiple windows at the same time. And the engine has excellent support for Particle system. Furthermore, the audio package offers utilities for writing and playing audio streams. 

 

Pitaya 

  • If you are looking forward to developing distributed multiplayer games, then this lightweight game server will work wonders for you.  
  • Pitaya comes with support for default service discovery and RPC modules, allowing communication between different types of servers with ease. 
  • Pitaya offers Websocket acceptors and TCP, which are separated from the request-receiving application.
  • Pitaya allows user sessions (binding sessions) to the users, and enables the application to mention the handlers, which deals with client messages. 
  • It has libpitaya as the official client library SDK and is congruent with open tracing. 

 

Termloop 

  • If you enjoy working in the terminal, then you will surely enjoy this Go game engine. You get access to a simple render loop in order to create the games in the terminal. 
  • You get to enjoy several features like debug logging, framerate counters, collision detection. Termloop also offers cross-compilation and easy transfer of compiled games. 
  • You can load color maps from images, level maps from JSON and entities from ASCII art. The engine also helps you to simulate the ‘camera’ movement, and render timers. 
  • It is built on top of Termbox, and the extras give you the way into a collection of functions and types. These come with external dependencies which you can nicely integrate into your project.

 

As you can see, game development with Golang libraries is very easy with the engines and the libraries at your disposal. So, if you wish to get started, do not hesitate to start your project. And if you need any help, you can always count on the GitHub community. 

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