LongStory 2, bevy_feathers, and Type Erased Materials

2025-06-30

LongStory 2, a new visual novel game, was released to Steam and Itch.io this week.

We also see the continued development of some jam games, building into compute shaders and more.

Bevy Feathers

bevy_feathers

#19730 introduces Bevy Feathers, an opinionated widget toolkit and theming system intended for use by the Bevy Editor, World Inspector, and other tools.

The bevy_feathers crate is incomplete and hidden behind an experimental feature flag. The API is going to change significantly before release.

Type Erased Materials

In order to enable a number of patterns for dynamic materials in the engine, decouples the renderer from the Material trait.

This opens the possibility for:

Materials that aren't coupled to AsBindGroup.
2d using the underlying 3d bindless infrastructure.
Dynamic materials that can change their layout at runtime.
Materials that aren't even backed by a Rust struct at all.

A new example, 3d/manual_material, demonstrates how to implement a material manually using the mid-level render APIs

TilemapChunk Rendering

tilemap chunk

#18866 is a first step towards first-party tilemaps, starting with a simple TilemapChunk rendering abstraction.

Check out the new tilemap_chunk example.

fn setup(mut commands: Commands, assets: Res<AssetServer>) {
    let mut rng = ChaCha8Rng::seed_from_u64(42);

    let chunk_size = UVec2::splat(64);
    let tile_display_size = UVec2::splat(8);
    let indices: Vec<Option<u16>> = (0..chunk_size.element_product())
        .map(|_| rng.gen_range(0..5))
        .map(|i| if i == 0 { None } else { Some(i - 1) })
        .collect();

    commands.spawn((
        TilemapChunk {
            chunk_size,
            tile_display_size,
            tileset: assets.load("textures/array_texture.png"),
            ..default()
        },
        TilemapChunkIndices(indices),
    ));

    commands.spawn(Camera2d);

    commands.insert_resource(SeededRng(rng));
}

Core Widgets

#19778 adds Radio Buttons to the core widgets

Serializable Meshes

#19743 brings serializable meshes which means that you can now attempt use cases such as sending a mesh over the Bevy Remote Protocol.

Alice's Merge Train is a maintainer-level view into active PRs and how the Bevy sausage is made.

Showcase

Bevy work from the #showcase channel in Discord and around the internet. Use hashtag #bevyengine.

Fairy Chess

A fairy chess engine prototype. The game lets you change piece types and extend the board during the match, allowing you to escape tight situations or certain checkmate. It supports 21 different piece types and up to 15x16 boards!

First draft: bevy_mod_asset_packs

bevy_mod_asset_packs implements a Cargo-like package manager within Bevy, to enable creating modular data packs for your game. It's implemented on top of modified AssetReader trait, together with support for downloading assets packs from Git repositories, Git-LFS and custom registrars.

DBM Knight's Tour

The addition of difficulty, tour types, and start position configuration to "DBM Knight's Tour"

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Enchanting Menu Prototype

A prototype of a bevy_ui based enchanting menu.

LongStory 2

LongStory 2 is a newly published game on Steam and itch.io.

The friendliest dating sim on the planet is back and ready to cuddle! A long-awaited sequel to the award-winning visual novel LongStory, our new season picks up where the first ended — the summer before high school begins.

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