Book Image

Game Development with Rust and WebAssembly

By : Eric Smith
Book Image

Game Development with Rust and WebAssembly

By: Eric Smith

Overview of this book

The Rust programming language has held the most-loved technology ranking on Stack Overflow for 6 years running, while JavaScript has been the most-used programming language for 9 years straight as it runs on every web browser. Now, thanks to WebAssembly (or Wasm), you can use the language you love on the platform that's everywhere. This book is an easy-to-follow reference to help you develop your own games, teaching you all about game development and how to create an endless runner from scratch. You'll begin by drawing simple graphics in the browser window, and then learn how to move the main character across the screen. You'll also create a game loop, a renderer, and more, all written entirely in Rust. After getting simple shapes onto the screen, you'll scale the challenge by adding sprites, sounds, and user input. As you advance, you'll discover how to implement a procedurally generated world. Finally, you'll learn how to keep your Rust code clean and organized so you can continue to implement new features and deploy your app on the web. By the end of this Rust programming book, you'll build a 2D game in Rust, deploy it to the web, and be confident enough to start building your own games.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Rust, WebAssembly, and Game Development
4
Part 2: Writing Your Endless Runner
11
Part 3: Testing and Advanced Tricks

Design a new game button

When RHB crashes into a rock, he falls over and… well, let's say he takes a nap. Unfortunately, at that point, the player has to refresh the page to start a new game. In most games, we'd see a series of buttons for a new game and high scores. For now, we'll just put in a new game button that will restart from the beginning. This might seem like a simple task, but in fact, we'll have quite a bit to do.

First, we need to decide how we want to implement the button. We really have two choices. We can create a button in the engine, which would be a sprite that is rendered to the canvas, the same as everything else, or we can use an HTML button and position it over the canvas. The first option will look right and won't require any traditional web programming, but it will also require us to detect mouse clicks and handle a button-click animation. In other words, we'd have to implement a button. That's more than we want...