Book Image

Hands-On Game Development with WebAssembly

By : Rick Battagline
Book Image

Hands-On Game Development with WebAssembly

By: Rick Battagline

Overview of this book

Within the next few years, WebAssembly will change the web as we know it. It promises a world where you can write an application for the web in any language, and compile it for native platforms as well as the web. This book is designed to introduce web developers and game developers to the world of WebAssembly by walking through the development of a retro arcade game. You will learn how to build a WebAssembly application using C++, Emscripten, JavaScript, WebGL, SDL, and HTML5. This book covers a lot of ground in both game development and web application development. When creating a game or application that targets WebAssembly, developers need to learn a plethora of skills and tools. This book is a sample platter of those tools and skills. It covers topics including Emscripten, C/C++, WebGL, OpenGL, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS. The reader will also learn basic techniques for game development, including 2D sprite animation, particle systems, 2D camera design, sound effects, 2D game physics, user interface design, shaders, debugging, and optimization. By the end of the book, you will be able to create simple web games and web applications targeting WebAssembly.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Creating a camera for our game

We are going to build our camera in several different stages. We will start with a bare-bones locked-on camera implementation. That will give us a good starting point from where we can add new camera features. Later, we will modify this camera to be a projected focus camera. A projected focus camera looks at the velocity of the player's ship and adjusts the camera so that it shows more of the gameplay area in front of the player. This technique works off the assumption that, in this game, the player is generally more focused on the gameplay in the direction the player's ship is moving. For the final version of our camera, we will add camera attractors to our projectiles. The idea behind this modification is that, when there are shots fired in the game, the camera should draw attention to that area of the game.

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