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

A quick game design session

In the previous chapter, I had you create a project called "Walk the Dog", and you were so engrossed by the process of creating a Rust project and my thrilling prose that you didn't even ask why that was the name of the project. Now we'll dig into the game we're making for this book – Walk the Dog.

Walk the Dog is an endless runner with a simple concept. You play as a boy walking his dog through the forest when your dog is surprised by a cat that runs by and starts chasing it. You, in turn, begin chasing your dog through the forest, dodging obstacles along the way, until you crash into one and fall down. At which point, of course, the dog turns around and checks on you.

In case you hadn't guessed, the idea for this game came to me while walking the dog on ice. I've used Miro (https://miro.com) to make a prototype, just to get a feel for what the game will look like:

Figure 2.1 – A Walk the Dog screen, hypothetically

Figure 2.1 &...