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

Show the button on game over

We can show and hide the button in the Game update method by checking on each frame if the game is over and if the button is present, ensuring that we only show or hide it once, and that would probably work, but I think you can sense the spaghetti code beginning to form if we do that. In general, it's best to avoid too much conditional logic in update, as it gets confusing and allows for logic bugs. Instead, we can think of every conditional check that looks like if (state_is_true) as two different states of the system. So, if the new game button is shown, that's one game state, and if it isn't, that's another game state. You know what that means – it's time for a state machine.

A state machine review

In Chapter 4, Managing Animations with State Machines, we converted RHB to a state machine in order to make it change animations on events easily and, more importantly, correctly. For instance, when we wanted RHB to jump...