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

Summary

In this chapter, we've done a lot. We've written our first WebAssembly app using Rust, moving from "Hello World" to drawing in the browser with HTML Canvas. You've added crates, run a development server, and interacted with the DOM. You've learned a lot about interacting with the browser, including the following:

  • Creating the main entry point with #[wasm_bindgen(start)]
  • Translating JavaScript code to Rust code
  • Dealing with crates that compile to JavaScript

You've also been introduced to HTML Canvas. Frankly, it's been a bit of a whirlwind, so don't worry if some information flew over your head, as we'll cover many of these topics again – including in the next chapter, where we'll start drawing sprites.