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

Axis-aligned bounding boxes

Checking whether two objects in our game have collided can, theoretically, be done by checking every pixel in every object and seeing whether they share a location. That logic, in addition to being very complicated to write, would be computationally extremely expensive. We need to run at 60 frames a second and can't spend our precious processing power trying to get that kind of perfection – not if we want the game to be fun, anyway. Fortunately, we can use a simplification that will be close enough to fool our silly eyes, the same way we can't tell that animation is really just a series of still images. That simplification is called the bounding box.

A bounding box is just a rectangle we'll use for collisions, instead of checking each pixel on the sprite. You can think of every sprite having a box around it, which looks like this:

Figure 5.4 – Bounding boxes

Figure 5.4 – Bounding boxes

These boxes aren't actually...