Introduction

What is Crossbow?

The crossbow project aims to provide a complete toolkit for cross-platform game development in Rust - from project creation to publishing. In addition, the project simplifies the creation, packaging, and signing of Android and iOS applications. We want to make most of our tools - engine agnostic to help rust game developers integrate them into their engines or games.

Why Crossbow?

There are already cargo-apk, cargo-mobile, cargo-xcode, etc. - why do I need another packaging tool?

Crossbow is more than an Android and iOS packager: it is a cross-platform Rust game-development toolkit. crossbundle turns standard Cargo projects into native .apk/.aab and .app/.ipa artifacts, with optional Gradle packaging for Android plugins. crossbundle-tools provides the same building blocks for custom workflows, while crossbow-android supports Android plugins written in Java/Kotlin.

A lot of functionality was inspired by Godot, Xamarin, and cargo-apk.

Design Goals

• Customizable: Create new commands with available tools.
• Simple: Easy to install and start hacking but also pretty flexible for strong devs.
• Cargo-first: Builds use Cargo's public CLI and consume the artifacts Cargo reports.
• Capable: Build native .apk/.aab and .app/.ipa artifacts, with optional Gradle packaging on Android.
• Rust: Don't leave your Rust code - everything can be configured from Cargo.toml.
• Plugins: Godot-like plugins for Android (and iOS in future) with Rust wrapper!

Next steps

As the next steps we recommend you to install and setup crossbundle to be able to build, test, and run your project!

See Getting Started for more information.