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

This was a hard, long, and complicated chapter. I'll quote a phrase Aaron Hillegass uses frequently in his books: "Programming is hard and you are not stupid." There were plenty of areas where a small typo could trip you up, and you may have had to go backward and forward several times. That's all okay – it's part of the learning process. I would encourage you to experiment with the skeleton we've built, even before moving onto the next chapter, as it's a great way to ensure you understand all the code.

In the end, we've accomplished a lot. We've created a game loop that will run in the browser at 60 frames per second while updating at a fixed step. We've set up an XNA-like game "engine" and separated the engine concerns from the game concerns. Our browser interface is wrapped in a module so that we can hide some of the details of the browser implementation. We're even processing input, making this work...