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

Adding keyboard input

Most games have some form of user input; otherwise, they aren't much of a game. In this section, we'll start listening to keyboard events and use them to control our RHB. That means adding keyboard input to the game loop and passing that into the update function. What we will not be doing is yet more refactoring. The system is reasonably well factored at this point and is open to our new changes.

The specific process by which we'll get keyboard events is probably a little different than you're used to if you do web development. In a normal program, you would listen for keys to get pressed – in other words, pushed down and then released – and then do something such as update the screen when the button is released. This doesn't fit in with a game because typical players want the action to happen as soon as a key is pushed down and want it to continue for as long as it's held. Think of moving around the screen with the...