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 button

Now that we know how to capture mouse input in WebAssembly using SDL, we can use this knowledge to create a button that can be clicked by a mouse. The first thing we will need to do is create a UIButton class definition inside of the game.hpp file. Our button will have more than one sprite texture associated with it. Buttons usually have a hover state and a clicked state, so we will want to display an alternative version of our sprite if the user is hovering the mouse cursor over the button, or has clicked the button:

Figure 14.5: Button states

To capture these events, we will need functions to detect whether the mouse has clicked on our button or hovered over it. Here is what our class definition looks like:

class UIButton {
public:
bool m_Hover;
bool m_Click;
bool m_Active;
void (*m_Callback)();

SDL_Rect m_dest = {.x...