Book Image

Hands-On Game Development with WebAssembly

By : Rick Battagline
Book Image

Hands-On Game Development with WebAssembly

By: Rick Battagline

Overview of this book

Within the next few years, WebAssembly will change the web as we know it. It promises a world where you can write an application for the web in any language, and compile it for native platforms as well as the web. This book is designed to introduce web developers and game developers to the world of WebAssembly by walking through the development of a retro arcade game. You will learn how to build a WebAssembly application using C++, Emscripten, JavaScript, WebGL, SDL, and HTML5. This book covers a lot of ground in both game development and web application development. When creating a game or application that targets WebAssembly, developers need to learn a plethora of skills and tools. This book is a sample platter of those tools and skills. It covers topics including Emscripten, C/C++, WebGL, OpenGL, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS. The reader will also learn basic techniques for game development, including 2D sprite animation, particle systems, 2D camera design, sound effects, 2D game physics, user interface design, shaders, debugging, and optimization. By the end of the book, you will be able to create simple web games and web applications targeting WebAssembly.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

UI requirements

The first thing we will need to do when implementing our UI is to decide on some requirements. What exactly do we need for our user interface? The first part of that is deciding what game screens we need for our game. This is usually the kind of thing you do early in the game design process, but because I am writing a book about WebAssembly, I have saved this step for a later chapter. Deciding what screens your game needs usually involves a storyboard and a process by which you either talk through (if more than one person is working on the game) or think through the way a user will interact with your web page, as well as the game that is on that page:

Figure 14.1: Storyboard example for our user interface

You don't have to draw a storyboard, but I find it useful when thinking through what I need for a game's UI. It is even more useful when you need to...