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)

Summary

In this chapter, we talked about different strategies we can use to debug and optimize our WebAssembly code. We discussed writing C macros, which allow us to easily remove calls to print to the console when we move from development into production. We talked about source maps, what they are, and how they can help us to debug our WebAssembly code from within a browser. We discussed using the debugger in both Chrome and Firefox to step through WebAssembly's source code. Finally, we discussed optimization in WebAssembly, what compiler options are available in Emscripten, and how we can go about improving our WebGL performance.