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

Summary

The website https://arewegameyet.rs asks the question, "Is Rust ready for game development?" and answers with, "Almost." Respectfully, because it's a really cool site, I disagree. We have all of the tools that JavaScript developers had a few years ago, with all the advantages of an excellent type system and Wasm. We have far more tools than developers have had for most of game development history, and while we may not have our Unity or Unreal yet, we have everything we need to build our own. So, go out there, build your own games, extend the engine, and have fun! I hope I hear from you with far better games than this one. If you need help, want to show off your games, or just want to hang out with like-minded people, you can find me on the Rustacean Station Discord at https://discord.gg/cHc3Gyc. You can always find me as @paytonrules on Twitter, and I'd be really excited to hear from you.