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)

Summary

In this chapter, we have discussed WebGL and how it can improve performance in web games. I have introduced you to the concept of GLSL shaders and talked about vertex shaders and fragment shaders, what the differences between the two types of shaders are, and how they are used to render a combination of geometry and images to the HTML5 canvas.

We also recreated the moving spaceship that we created with the 2D canvas using WebGL. We have discussed how to use vertex geometry to render 2D images to a 3D canvas. We also talked about the differences between the pixel-based 2D canvas coordinate system and the 3D WebGL coordinate system.

WebGL is a broad topic to cover, so a single chapter can only give a very cursory introduction at best. WebGL is a 3D rendering space, and in this chapter, I went out of my way to ignore that and treat it like a 2D space. You could take what...