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 new HTML shell and C file

In this section, we are going to create a new shell.c file that exposes several functions called from our JavaScript. We will also use EM_ASM to call the InitWrappers function that we will define inside the new HTML shell file that we will be creating. This function will create wrappers inside JavaScript that can call functions defined in the WebAssembly module. Before creating the new HTML shell file, we need to create the C code that will be called by the JavaScript wrappers inside the HTML shell:

  1. Create the new shell.c file as follows:
#include <emscripten.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
printf("Hello World\n");
EM_ASM( InitWrappers() );
printf("Initialization Complete\n");
}

void test() {
printf("button test\n");
}

void int_test( int num ) {
printf("int...