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

Creating automated tests

In an ideal world, every system would have a large amount of testing, both automated and manual, that's done by developers and QA. Some ways to test your game is working correctly involve doing the following:

  • Using types to prevent programmer errors
  • Playing the game yourself
  • Performing automated unit tests
  • Performing automated integration tests

So far, we've only used the first two, which is an unfortunately common approach in real-world code. This can be suitable for personal or hobby projects but it isn't robust enough for production applications, particularly those written by a team.

Almost any application can benefit from automated, programmer-written unit tests and as a program becomes even larger, it begins to benefit from integration tests as well. There's not a consistent definition of the differences between these two types of tests as you tend to know them when you see them, but fortunately, we can...