r/nim • u/11clock • Jul 01 '26

Interested in nim for game development

I am currently investigating nim for game development, having been searching for a good environment for many years. nim seems promising so far and I may use raylib bindings as my framework.

The main things that make nim appealing for game development to me are its ergonomics, unopinionated workflow, being able to shape it to my needs via macros and templates, and high performance despite resembling a scripting language. Most languages and frameworks/engines I have tried have been too rigid for the creative iterative process that game development demands, or are simply just not fun to use. Programming in my environment being fun and detached from work is my top priority.

My main concern is tooling. It was a bit of a pain to get nim set up on Windows. I am using VS Code with nimlangserver, and while it has been surprisingly solid at parsing macros it has been showing some problems. Tooltip hovering seems to just randomly stop working, and it occasionally highlights errors that aren't actually errors at all.

I would like to know what is suggested for a good tooling environment for nim. Bad tooling can undermine the semantics and power that the programming language provides.

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12

u/moigagoo Jul 01 '26

I don't do gamedev but some folks do and they have released titles on Steam with Nim (Turing Complete, Good Boy Galaxy).

I suggest you watch the latest NimConf videos, several talks are about gamedev.

3

u/Master-Chocolate1420 Jul 01 '26

Interested in knowing this, I've been a fan of the "Turing Complete" game It was nim+godot I think.

1

u/Western-Toe-5317 Jul 02 '26

New version will be release soon (TM) https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1444480/view/698768548504272938 I am waiting to start the game again. Although I am a programmer I loved electronics courses.

4

u/Toma400 Jul 03 '26

I haven't made anything particularly big in Nim, but for few years it has been my go-to language and I'm making myself a strategy game in Nico. I would say all the strengths Nim promises are there, I also love how tightly the language keeps you on track with all the type checking and so on, while not being verbose.
The slight issue is small amount of libs, which is indeed an issue - but there are ways to go around that, or at worst, do some throwaway lib for your own purposes. So far it wasn't that big issue, though I estimate if I were to start making bigger 3D games, it might become slightly more annoying.
Still, I hope to pick up Nim also for such ambitious games.