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)

Debug macro and stack trace

One way you can start debugging your code is by using #define to create a debugging macro, which we can activate by passing a flag into the Emscripten compiler. However, this will resolve to nothing if we don't pass that flag. Macros are easy to add, and we can create a call that prints a line if we are running with our debug flag, but will not slow down performance if we aren't. If you are not familiar with preprocessor commands, they are commands that are issued to the compiler that evaluate while the code is compiled instead of at runtime. For instance, if I used a #ifdef PRINT_ME command, the line of code would only be compiled into our source code if the PRINT_ME macro is defined either with a #define PRINT_ME macro on a line earlier in the code, or if we compiled the source with the -DPRINT_ME flag passed into the compiler when we ran...