I Built My First Game in Ebitengine: 3 Shocking Lessons 2025

Diving Headfirst into Go's Game Dev Scene

For years, I've been a Go developer by trade, appreciating its stark simplicity, powerful concurrency, and pragmatic approach to software engineering. But my passion has always been game development. The usual suspects—Unity and Godot—felt heavy, packed with features and editors I didn't always need. Then I stumbled upon Ebitengine, a 2D game library for Go that promised the same minimalist philosophy I loved. The tagline, "A dead simple 2D game library in Go," was irresistible.

So, I took the plunge. I set out to build a simple arcade-style space shooter, expecting a straightforward, code-centric experience. What I got was a series of revelations that reshaped how I think about game architecture. Forget what you've heard; these are the three shocking lessons I learned building my first game in Ebitengine in 2025.

Lesson 1: Simplicity is a Double-Edged Sword

Ebitengine's main selling point is its simplicity. And it delivers—aggressively. This isn't the gentle, guided simplicity of a tool like GameMaker. It's the profound, spartan simplicity of a library that gives you a canvas, an update loop, and little else. This was both exhilarating and, initially, a bit terrifying.

The Joy of a Minimal API

Within an hour, I had a window open, a sprite drawn on the screen, and basic keyboard input moving it around. There was no complex editor to learn, no scene tree to manage, and no boilerplate to wade through. The core of an Ebitengine game is a struct that satisfies the ebiten.Game interface, which requires three methods: Update, Draw, and Layout. That's it.

This minimalism is liberating. It forces you to think in pure Go. Your game state is just a struct. Your entities are slices of structs. Your logic is just... functions. There's no "engine magic" happening behind the scenes. If you can write Go, you can write a game in Ebitengine. This directness is a massive confidence booster and lets you get to the fun part—making the game—almost instantly.

The 'Oh, I Have to Build That?' Moment

The shock came when I wanted to add a main menu, a pause screen, and a game-over state. In an engine like Godot, you'd switch scenes. In Unity, you'd load a new scene or manage canvases. In Ebitengine? There is no scene manager. There is no built-in UI toolkit. There isn't even a physics engine.

Suddenly, the "dead simple" library required me to be a software architect. I had to design my own state machine for game states. I had to write my own simple button logic for the UI. I had to implement my own collision detection (AABB, or Axis-Aligned Bounding Box, in my case). While initially daunting, this was a blessing in disguise. It forced me to build systems that were perfectly tailored to my game's needs—no bloat, no cruft. The lesson wasn't that Ebitengine was lacking; it was that Ebitengine trusts you to build the game, not just script the engine.

Lesson 2: Performance is (Almost) Free, But Architecture is King

Go is fast, and Ebitengine is incredibly efficient. The promise of high performance without becoming a C++ graphics wizard is a huge draw. But I learned that performance is more than just raw framerate; it's about architectural sanity.

Effortless 60 FPS: The Initial High

Drawing hundreds of sprites? No problem. Ebitengine's rendering pipeline is optimized to handle a surprising number of draw calls through techniques like automatic batching. My little space shooter, with dozens of bullets, asteroids, and particle effects, never dipped below 60 FPS. It felt like magic. I wasn't thinking about shaders, texture atlases, or low-level optimizations. The library was just handling it.

This is a huge advantage for indie developers. You're freed from the minutiae of graphics programming to focus on gameplay. Ebitengine provides the performance headroom, so you can fill it with your creative ideas.

When Goroutines Aren't a Magic Bullet

The shock came when I tried to get clever with Go's concurrency. "I'll just run my AI logic in a separate goroutine!" I thought. This was a classic mistake. The Ebitengine Update loop is not thread-safe by default. Accessing game state from multiple goroutines without proper synchronization (like mutexes or channels) leads to race conditions and unpredictable behavior.

The real lesson here is that Ebitengine's performance lets you focus on a different, more important problem: state management and software architecture. The challenge isn't making the rendering fast; it's designing a clean, single-threaded update loop that manages all your game logic predictably. You can still use goroutines for background tasks like loading assets or network communication, but the core game simulation should be kept simple and synchronous. Performance comes from a well-designed system, not just a fast engine.

Engine Showdown: Ebitengine vs. Godot

To put my experience into context, here's a high-level comparison with another popular 2D engine, Godot.

Lesson 3: The Go Ecosystem is Your *Real* Toolbox

My final, and perhaps most profound, shock was realizing that I was thinking about the engine all wrong. I was looking for "Ebitengine plugins" when I should have been looking for "Go packages."

Beyond the Engine: Leveraging Standard Libraries

Need to save game data? Don't look for a special Ebitengine serialization function. Just use Go's standard encoding/json or encoding/gob package to serialize your game state struct and write it to a file. Want to add online leaderboards? Use the standard net/http package to build a simple client-server model.

Ebitengine doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. It's not a walled garden like many other game engines. It's a Go library that plays nicely with the entire Go ecosystem. This mental shift is powerful. It means any problem you solve for your game is also a problem you're solving in Go, making the skills you learn incredibly transferable.

Finding Your Game's Logic in Go Packages

This extends to third-party packages. Instead of searching for a "pathfinding asset," I found a generic A* pathfinding Go library and integrated it. For vector math, I used a dedicated Go math package instead of relying on engine-specific vector types. This approach has two massive benefits:

1. Quality and Focus: You can choose best-in-class, battle-tested Go libraries for specific tasks rather than relying on a jack-of-all-trades engine implementation.
2. Decoupling: Your core game logic is not tightly coupled to Ebitengine. The rendering and input are, but your state management, AI, and utility functions are just Go code. This makes testing, refactoring, and even porting parts of the logic much easier.

Final Thoughts: Would I Use Ebitengine Again?

Absolutely. But with a different mindset. Ebitengine is not for everyone. If you're an artist, a designer, or a developer who wants a comprehensive visual editor and a huge asset store, Godot or Unity is a better choice.

But if you are a programmer, especially a Go programmer, who believes that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Ebitengine is a revelation. It strips away the layers of abstraction and puts you back in control. It forces you to be a better software architect, and in doing so, it helps you build clean, efficient, and highly customized games. The shocking lessons weren't about the engine's failures but about its profound, minimalist success. It taught me that the best game engine is sometimes the one that gets out of your way.