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)

Keyboard Input

Now that we have sprites and animations, and can move these sprites around our canvas, we will need to add some interaction into our game. There are a few ways we can get keyboard input for our game. One way is through JavaScript, making calls to different functions in our WebAssembly module based on that input. The first section of our code will do just that. We will add some functions inside the WebAssembly module for us to wrap in JavaScript wrappers. We will also set up some JavaScript keyboard event handlers that we will use to make calls into our WebAssembly module whenever the keyboard events are triggered.

The other way we can get input into our WebAssembly module is to allow SDL to do all the heavy lifting for us. That involves adding C code into our WebAssembly module that captures the SDL_KEYDOWN and SDL_KEYUP events. The module will then look at the...