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 discussed the Emscripten minimal shell HTML file, what its various components are, and how they work. We also wrote about what parts of the file we can do without, if we are not using our shell to generate canvas code. You learned about the Module object, and how it is the interface that uses the JavaScript glue code to tie the JavaScript in our HTML and our WebAssembly together. We then created a new WebAssembly module that contained functions we exported to allow JavaScript to use Module.cwrap to create JavaScript functions we could then call from our DOM that executes our WebAssembly functions.

We created a brand new HTML shell file that used some of the Module code from the Emscripten minimal shell, but rewrote the HTML and CSS of the original shell almost entirely. We were then able to compile that new C code and HTML shell file into a working...