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

Chapter 3: Creating a Game Loop

In the first two chapters, we focused on getting an application built, an environment set up, and graphics on a screen without concerning ourselves with creating an actual functioning game. There's no interactivity here, and no straightforward way to add more characters without copying and pasting more code. In this chapter, that will change, with the addition of a game loop and keyboard events, but first, we're going to need to restructure the code to make it ready for our new features. Be prepared to dig in – this is going to be a busy chapter.

We're going to cover the following:

  • Minimal architecture for games
  • Creating a game loop
  • Adding a keyboard input
  • Moving Red Hat Boy

By the end of the chapter, we'll have a mini-game engine that's ready to be extended with new features and process input.