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)

Animating a sprite

In this section, we will learn how to make a quick and dirty little animation in our SDL application. That will not be the way we do animations in our final game, but it will give you an idea of how we could create animations from within SDL by swapping out textures over time. I am going to present the code to animate a sprite broken into two parts. The first part includes our preprocessor macros, global variables, and the show_animation function:

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

#include <emscripten.h>
#include <stdio.h>

#define SPRITE_FILE "sprites/Franchise1.png"
#define EXP_FILE "sprites/FranchiseExplosion%d.png"
#define FRAME_COUNT 7

int current_frame = 0;
Uint32 last_time;
Uint32 current_time;
Uint32 ms_per_frame = 100; // animate at 10 fps

SDL_Window *window;
SDL_Renderer *renderer;
SDL_Rect dest = {.x ...