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

Introducing state machines

Games, web applications, heck, even cryptocurrency miners, have to manage the state of the system. After all, if the system isn't doing something right now, if it doesn't have a current state, then it's not running, is it? The state is also fractal. In our game, we have a state of playing, and another one of game over. Once we add menu items, we'll have even more states. Meanwhile, our RHB also has states: he's running, sliding, jumping, dying, and dead. Let's say unconscious, that's less dark.

The point is our game is doing a lot of things and is maintaining a large game state with a lot of mini-states inside it. As the application moves from one state to another, the rules of the system change. For example, when RHB is running, the spacebar might make him jump, but when he's jumping, hitting the spacebar doesn't do anything. The rule is you can't jump when you're already jumping. One way you can...