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

Creating a real scene

At the moment, RHB can move anywhere he wants, in an empty void, such as the one in The Matrix. It's progress; all that animation was real work, but it's not a game. It's time we put RHB in a setting – a background, platforms, maybe something to jump over. Let's start with a background.

Adding the background

Right now, our game can only render images from a sprite sheet, which we can use for a background, but that's overkill for one image. Instead, we'll add a new struct that draws a simple image from a .png file. Then, we'll add that to the draw and initialize functions in WalkTheDog:

  1. Create an Image struct.

We can work bottom-up for these changes, adding code to the engine and then integrating it into the game. Our Image struct will use a lot of the same code that we wrote in Chapter 2, Drawing Sprites, but with a simpler setup because we won't be using a sheet. All of this code should go into...