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

Managing animation

We'll create our state machine to manage the different animations. Specifically, when RHB isn't moving, he's Idle, but when he's moving, he's Running. When he jumps, he's Jumping. You get the idea.

Those different RHB states correspond to the different animations managed using a state machine. We'll first create the RHB with a state machine and then integrate it into our current application. We'll implement this top-down, starting with a struct that represents RHB and letting the compiler errors drive further development. This is sometimes called Compiler-Driven Development although it's not a formalized approach such as Test-Driven Development. It can work extremely well in a language with a robust type system and great compiler errors, such as Rust. Let's start with how we'll represent RHB.

The RedHatBoy struct will contain the state machine, the sprite sheet, and the image because eventually, it will...