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

Chapter 9: Testing, Debugging, and Performance

In this book, we've built an entire game using two tools to test our logic – that is, a compiler and our eyes. If the game doesn't compile, it's broken, and if Red Hat Boy (RHB) doesn't look right, it's broken – simple enough. Fortunately, the compiler provides a lot of tools to make sure we don't make mistakes. Let's be honest, though – it's not enough.

Developing a game can be a long process, especially if you're a hobbyist. When you only have 4 hours to work on it in a given week, they can't all be spent fighting the same bug. To ensure our game works, we need to test it, find mistakes, and make sure it's not too slow. That's what we're going to be doing here.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Creating automated tests
  • Debugging the game
  • Measuring performance with the browser

After completing this chapter...