Real-world game development
with Ebitengine
- How to make the best-selling Go game
Daigo Sato

All of our games are
made with Ebitengine.
https://ebiten.org/

It works on Nintendo Switch™!

Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch™
https://ebiten.org/blog/native_compiling_for_nintendo_switch.html

Why Go?
?
Go Gopher by Renee French is
licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Number of reasons NOT to use
Go for Game Development
Back then (2017)
● No widely used game engines for Go existed
● No IDE like Unity3D/Unreal was available
● Not many 3rd party libraries were available for game development
● There were only small communities
● There is no official Go support on any console
● Daigo had professional experience in Unity3D and had no clue about
Go

Hi, Daigo!
Why don’t you use my
OSS game library
written in Go for your
new games!?
Dude,
It does not make
sense to use Go
for Game
Development
Hajime Hoshi Daigo Sato

You can learn Go
quickly, you are a
smart man!!
I’ll help writing the RPG
engine as well, deal?
Hmm?
It sounds good
actually... And you are
right, a smart person
should learn Go!
Hajime Hoshi Daigo Sato

I decided to use Go

So many challenges
● The game library (Ebitengine) did not have any multi-platform
support yet, it needed to be ported to every platform we wanted to
sell our game.
● The OSS was still immature, unstable, performance problems
○ Not reaching 30 FPS for a simple 2D game
○ No support for mp3, ogg
○ QA in production (Using our players as QA)
● If Hajime is bored with Ebiten, my business is over
※ all info above is based on the situation of the year of 2016
All of them above are unnecessary if you used Unity3D or Unreal

Was it worth it?
?

Hajime is Happy
Hajime Hoshi
● Used Odencat games to test Ebitengine
● Odencat games being the Demo for Ebitengine
● Bear’s Restaurant proves Ebitengine runs on
Nintendo Switch™
● Someone is Dogfooding your OSS
● Fun and comfortable working experience with Go
● Gives energy to his life

Daigo is ...
Daigo Sato

Daigo is Happy
Daigo Sato
● Very fast iteration with very short compile time.
● The limitation rather gave the power
● Being able to borrow the super talented engineer’s
power
● Have the feeling of full-control
○ Closer to native
○ High Maintainability / Portability
○ Dedication for crash-free
● Homebrew game engine is good for mental health

Chicken Egg Problem

We’ve grown together

How we make games

We have to make many games

In a meaningful way

Evolve games
Clock of Atonement
Ported the existing RPGMaker2000 game
Bluebird of Happiness
Prove if we can make an escape room game / implemented sponsor system
Bear’s Restaurant
Support edge to edge experience for all devices / Ads Minigame System
Fishing Paradiso
Prove we can make more non-RPG games

Write once,
Run Everywhere

Odencat Game Runtime
Native Layer
IAP / Ads / Analytics / Storage / ...
Game Data
Odencat RPG Runtime
Common Logic / Game Logic
ObjC/Java/C++
Go + Ebitengine
msgpack
per platform
one
per game

For each game, we are just swapping the game data
♫
Game Data
Music
Graphics
Scripts
.ogg
.png
.json

RPG Editor
● ReactJS + Electron
● Very similar to RPG Maker
series
● Build a game only with
commands
● Non-engineers can make
games

Animation Tool
● Pure Go tool
● Make keyframe animations
● Let artist make animations
without using the RPG
Editor

Switch target to make different builds.
The same Go code runs for
every game & every platform

One improvement for All
New Feature / Optimization / Crash fix / SDK Update

Test in Production
Sharing the codebase enabled us to use
our less popular games to test new features/updates.
OK OK

Wrap up

Take away
● Solve the Chicken-Egg Problem if you build OSS
● I you develop everything from scratch, you should
have a good reason to do so.
● Making a game with Go is fun

Add to Wishlist NOW!

@daigo
Follow me on Twitter!