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)

Compiling and running

Now that we have made all the necessary changes to our code, we can compile and run our new code with Emscripten:

em++ asteroid.cpp audio.cpp camera.cpp collider.cpp emitter.cpp enemy_ship.cpp finite_state_machine.cpp locator.cpp main.cpp particle.cpp player_ship.cpp projectile_pool.cpp projectile.cpp range.cpp render_manager.cpp shield.cpp ship.cpp star.cpp vector.cpp -o sound_fx.html --preload-file audio --preload-file sprites -std=c++17 -s USE_WEBGL2=1 -s USE_SDL=2 -s USE_SDL_IMAGE=2 -s SDL2_IMAGE_FORMATS=["png"] -s USE_SDL_IMAGE=2 -s SDL2_IMAGE_FORMATS=["png"] 

There are no new flags added to allow us to use the SDL Audio library. However, we need to add a new --preload-file audio flag to load the new audio directory into our virtual filesystem. Once you have compiled the new version of the game, you can run it using emrun (assuming...