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 2D lighting demo app

We can start our lighting app by creating a new C file called lighting.c. The macros at the beginning of lighting.c are the same macros we used in glow.c, but we can remove the #define TWOPI macro because it is no longer needed. Here are the macros we will have in our lighting.c file:

#include <SDL2/SDL.h>
#include <SDL2/SDL_image.h>
#include <SDL_opengl.h>

#include <GLES3/gl3.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <emscripten.h>

#define CANVAS_WIDTH 800
#define CANVAS_HEIGHT 600
#define FLOAT32_BYTE_SIZE 4
#define STRIDE FLOAT32_BYTE_SIZE*4

The vertex shader code in this file will be very similar to the vertex shader code we had in our glow.c file. The one change we will make is done by removing the u_translate uniform variable. We are doing this because we will be centering our shaded sprite image, and we will allow the user...