I know the title looks insane, but hear me out.

I wanted to make a game, specifically an isometric 2.5D RPG game, nothing that fancy.

So I decided to write it in Rust because I... like Enums, or something, and I had already finished the concurrency chapter, so I should be able to hang on.

Bevy seemed like the most complete engine out there, if overkill for my use case, but it's presumably so modular I could de-bloat it adequately, But...

Someone I know has a laptop; it is old.

It is not super old, a Toshiba Portege R700 with a locked BIOS which took me 3 days to trick its Windows 10 boot loader into booting Debian, and accidentally, yet irresponsibly, broke Windows and installed Grub.

There is no reason the thing shouldn't be able to run my hypothetical game. I've personally seen it LANning Sven Co-Op (Half-Life Co-Op) not long ago; the beast could maintain 60FPS for a solid few minutes, before overheating and dropping to 5, but it should hold on better now that I installed GNU/Linux.

So I, just to make sure, ran the command that exposes the OpenGL version used by Mesa, and... Open GL (ES?) 1.5? I surely, need a plan.

I noticed this issue with many indies. Many would-run-on-a-2005-thinkpad games sacrifice this untapped market for features they never use, or worse, go against the artistic vision.

So, since Bevy is modular, can I, a humble would-be-intern, write a rendering backend for the 2003 specification, but not before learning what a rendering backend is?

Or can I, a seasoned searcher, find a premade solution solution for Bevy or any other Rust engine, made to use the 2003 spec, or even the 1992 1.0 spec?

Or would it be worthwhile, to construct an engine of mine?

Edit: Or can I, a man of determination, write an FFI for an existing C solution?