Bob Nystrom - Is There More to Game Architecture than ECS?

What people said

marcingas · 2026-05 · Recommendation

I'd say don't immediately go into making an ECS and don't sweat about perf too much. You can totally do this in any programming language. This is a good talk about roguelike software design in general: [VIDEO] Tbh the whole channel is a gold mine of inspiration. Also check: [LINK]

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halvnykterist · 2021-10 · Recommendation

I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of sum types as enums make many of them all the more powerful. [0]: [VIDEO]

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hu3 · 2020-09 · Recommendation

This is known and heavily used by the game industry for a long time now. Ultimately it comes down to data locality and there's no silver bullet. Performance varies with your data access pattern and code must be adapted to keep caches as warm as possible. There are also maintainability trade-offs. In general I'd advise this kind of optimization only for performance-critical code like games. For more information on how game development approaches this, read about Entity Component Systems. Here's a good start: [VIDEO]

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