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

Measuring performance with a browser

The first step in debugging performance is answering the question, Do you have a performance problem? Too many developers, especially game developers, worry too early about performance and introduce complex code for a performance gain that just isn't there.

For example, do you know why so much of this code uses i16 and f16? Well, when I was going back to school a few years ago, I took a game optimization class in C++, where our final project needed to optimize a particle system. The biggest performance gains were to convert 32-bit integers into 16-bit integers. As my professor would say, "We got to the moon on 16-bit!" So, when I was writing this code, I internalized the lesson and made the variables 16-bit unless they were being sent to JavaScript, where everything is 32-bit anyway. Well, allow me to quote directly from the WebAssembly specification (found at https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/syntax/types.html):

Number...