Book Image

Hands-On Game Development with WebAssembly

By : Rick Battagline
Book Image

Hands-On Game Development with WebAssembly

By: Rick Battagline

Overview of this book

Within the next few years, WebAssembly will change the web as we know it. It promises a world where you can write an application for the web in any language, and compile it for native platforms as well as the web. This book is designed to introduce web developers and game developers to the world of WebAssembly by walking through the development of a retro arcade game. You will learn how to build a WebAssembly application using C++, Emscripten, JavaScript, WebGL, SDL, and HTML5. This book covers a lot of ground in both game development and web application development. When creating a game or application that targets WebAssembly, developers need to learn a plethora of skills and tools. This book is a sample platter of those tools and skills. It covers topics including Emscripten, C/C++, WebGL, OpenGL, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS. The reader will also learn basic techniques for game development, including 2D sprite animation, particle systems, 2D camera design, sound effects, 2D game physics, user interface design, shaders, debugging, and optimization. By the end of the book, you will be able to create simple web games and web applications targeting WebAssembly.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

WebGL and JavaScript

As we learned in the previous chapter, working with the 2D canvas was pretty straightforward. To draw an image, you just need to translate the context to the pixel coordinates where you want to draw the image, and call the drawImage context function by passing in the image, its width, and its height. You could make this even simpler and forget about the translation passing the x and y coordinates directly into the drawImage function if you prefer. With the 2D canvas, you are working with images, but with WebGL, you are always working with 3D geometry, even when you are coding a 2D game. With WebGL, you will need to render textures onto geometry. You need to work with vertex buffers and texture coordinates. The vertex shader we wrote earlier takes 3D coordinate data and texture coordinates and passes those values onto a fragment shader that will interpolate...