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

Deploying test and production builds

For deployments, we'll use Netlify, which is a cloud computing company that specializes in single-page applications (SPAs) like Walk the Dog. It has a generous free tier and a lot of features, such as test deploys with unique URLs, that aren't available with other free solutions such as GitHub Pages. We're going to set up a build that deploys a test version on each push to a branch. Then, when the code has been merged to main, it will perform the production build. Production is defined loosely here, as we won't go in great depth into tasks such as getting a custom domain for your app or monitoring for errors, but it's the version of the app that will be publicly available.

In order to deploy from GitHub to Netlify, we'll have to do some wiring so that GitHub has access to push to your Netlify account, and we have a site to push to. So, we're going to use the Netlify CLI to set up a site and prepare it for GitHub...