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)

A more advanced camera

Our current camera is functional, but a little boring. It focuses exclusively on the player, which works all right, but could be significantly improved. For starters, as the designers of Defender realized, it is more important to put the focus of the camera in the direction the player is moving, instead of directly on the player. To accomplish this, we will add projected focus to our camera. That will look at the current velocity of the player's ship, and will move the camera forward in the direction of that velocity. There are times, however, when you may still want the focus of your camera behind the player. To help with this, we will add some camera attractors. Camera attractors are objects that draw the camera's attention toward them. If the enemy appears behind the player, it may be more important to move the camera back somewhat to help keep...