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 chapter covered one topic, but one of the most important topics in game development. State machines are everywhere in games, which we saw when we implemented a small one to manage the Loaded and Loading states of the WalkTheDog enum itself. They are a particularly nice way to implement animation states that must correspond with what the player is doing, and Rust has great ways to implement this pattern. We used two: the simple one for WalkTheDog, and the much more complex RedHatBoyStateMachine that uses the typestate pattern. The typestate pattern is a commonly used pattern in Rust, both inside and outside of game development, so you can expect to see it in many Rust projects.

We also used the compiler to drive development, over and over again. It's an incredibly useful technique, where you can start with what you want the code to look like and use the compiler's error messages to help you fill in the rest of the implementation. The code becomes like a paint...