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

Further resources

After working through this game and completing some of the challenges that I just mentioned, maybe you want to go even bigger with your next game. I hope you do. You can add particle effects, explosions, or an online scorekeeping system. You can also use this framework as the start of a completely original game. You can also decide to use this game as an introduction and start a completely new game of your own using a completely different framework. This section is meant to show you just a few of the options available to you now if you want to keep making games, especially with Rust and WebAssembly.

Using JavaScript libraries

This entire game has been written using Rust as our language of choice, effectively discarding the entire JavaScript ecosystem. That's been a deliberate choice, but it's not the only one. We could also have called into a Rust Wasm library from an existing JavaScript framework or could have used wasm-bindgen to enable calling out...