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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to create a basic game framework. We learned what a game loop is and how we create one for WebAssembly using Emscripten. We learned about game objects and created classes to define our player's spaceship, an enemy spaceship, and projectiles. We learned about object pooling, and how we can use an object pool to recycle objects in memory so that we do not need to create and destroy new objects in memory continually. We used this knowledge to create an object pool for our projectiles. We also created an AI stub for our enemy spaceship that gave that object random behavior, and we created functions that let our player and enemy shoot at each other while our projectiles pass harmlessly through the spaceships.

By the end of the next chapter, we will add collision detection; this will allow our projectiles to destroy the spaceships they hit...