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)

Simple audio with Emscripten

Before we add sound effects to our main game, I will show you how to make an audio player in the audio.c file to demonstrate how SDL Audio can be used to play sound effects in a WebAssembly application. This application will take five sound effects that we will use in our game and allow the user to press number keys one to five to play all of the chosen sound effects. I will first show you the code broken into two sections, and then I will walk you through what everything does. Here is all of the code in audio.c with the exception of the main function:

#include <SDL2/SDL.h>
#include <emscripten.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdbool.h>

#define ENEMY_LASER "/audio/enemy-laser.wav"
#define PLAYER_LASER "/audio/player-laser.wav"
#define LARGE_EXPLOSION "/audio/large-explosion.wav"
#define SMALL_EXPLOSION...