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 have covered rendering sprites to the screen, including sprite sheets, but we actually covered so much more than that. We covered how to use futures and async code in a WebAssembly app, how to parse JSON, and perhaps most confusingly how to send Rust closures to JavaScript via the Closure struct. We also reviewed some of the quirks of using Rust in the WebAssembly environment from Chapter 1, Hello WebAssembly. This chapter was fun, but we made some messy code.

In the next chapter, we'll deal with that by setting up a simple architecture for our game and writing a proper game loop. Lest you think Chapter 3, Creating a Game Loop, is all refactoring, we'll also move our friend Red Hat Boy around the screen. It'll start to look like a real game!