Go Invaders: Taming Complexity with ECS and Ebitengine 👾🚀

Building an arcade classic like Space Invaders in Go (Golang) is a rewarding challenge. But when you have hundreds of entities (invaders, bullets, explosions) interacting, a traditional object-oriented approach can quickly turn chaotic.

The solution is an Entity Component System (ECS) architecture, which provides the necessary structure, paired with the lean, multi-platform power of the Ebitengine 2D graphics library. This combination delivers clean code, excellent performance, and easy scalability.

The Power Duo: Ebitengine Meets ECS

Ebitengine (formerly Ebiten) is brilliant at one thing: drawing things quickly onto the screen and handling input. It’s a low-level graphics and audio library.

ECS, however, is an architectural pattern that dictates how your game data and logic are organized. It brings structure to the chaos of game state.

This blog is just a preview of the game created using ECS & Ebiten engine. Watch the Preview video on of the Space Invaders game written using ECS engine and Ebiten game library, credits to hggx user on github who created this game.