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

Rendering a sprite

Sprite is a term so commonplace that it's possible to use it in conversation without actually knowing its meaning, yet properly defining it means properly defining bitmap, which in turn means properly defining pixmap. Did you know the term sprite was coined in the 1970s by Danny Hillis (http://bit.ly/3aZlJ72)? It's exhausting.

While I find all of this fascinating, you didn't get this book for that, so for our purposes, a sprite is a 2D image loaded from a file. Red Hat Boy, his dog and cat, and the background will all be sprites. Let's not waste any more time on definitions and start drawing one.

Loading images

We'll start by unzipping the assets and copying the Idle (1).png file from resized/rhb into the static directory in your project. This will make it reachable from your program. As we build the program out, we'll need further organization, but for one file, this is fine. Next, we'll need to modify our code. You can...