A visual novel engine written in Rust. And it uses QuickJS to run React, allowing you to create more complex UIs and gameplay.
It started out as a project for me to keep learning Rust (and pick up some computer graphics knowledge btw). I worked on it on and off for several years. Recently, I lost my job, so I decided to take this opportunity to finish it.
Visual novels have been polluted by quite a lot "AAA" games (AI story, AI images, and AI audio...just for joke), but I still believe that stories written by humans and images drawn by hand are precious things that connect us in this era...
For the past few years, I’ve been trying to build my ideal visual novel engine, and I’ve come to realize that I’ve largely been implementing a general-purpose 2D GUI solution.
Just like react-canvas back in the day, I combined wgpu and quickjs, and used the latter to run React. Of course, there’s no react-dom involved here; I have a custom renderer built with reconciler that binds to elements like `<sprite>` or `<text>` that I implemented in Rust.
Today this reminded me that maybe I should submit my project to arewegameyet and areweguiyet…
Recently I’ve been trying to add a visual editor to it—you know, similar to the relationship between RPG Maker MV and Pixijs. As a former frontend engineer and current Rust client engineer, I felt I had plenty of options. First, I looked into GPUI, and I have to say it’s a fantastic project, but unfortunately, it lacks the essential components I need to build my application. In the end, I had to go with a traditional solution like Tauri+ShadCN because I want to focus on the project itself.
It started out as a project for me to keep learning Rust (and pick up some computer graphics knowledge btw). I worked on it on and off for several years. Recently, I lost my job, so I decided to take this opportunity to finish it.
It's now on github: https://github.com/Icemic/moyu/blob/main/README_EN.md
Visual novels have been polluted by quite a lot "AAA" games (AI story, AI images, and AI audio...just for joke), but I still believe that stories written by humans and images drawn by hand are precious things that connect us in this era...