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)

Moving the sprite

Now that we have learned how to animate our sprite in a frame-by-frame animation, we will learn how to move a sprite around on our canvas. I want to keep our spaceship animated, but I would prefer it not run in an explosion loop. In our sprites folder, I have included a simple four-stage animation that causes our ship's engines to flicker. The source code is quite lengthy, so I will introduce it in three parts: a preprocessor and global variable section, the show_animation function, and the main function.

Here is the code that defines the preprocessor directives and the global variables at the beginning of our cpp file:

#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/Franchise%d.png"

#define FRAME_COUNT...