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)

Using keyboard input to move a sprite

Now that we know how to get keyboard input and use it in our WebAssembly module, let's figure out how we can take that keyboard input and use it to move our spaceship sprite around the HTML canvas. Let's begin by copying sprite_move.c from the Chapter04 directory into the Chapter05 directory. That will give us a good starting point. Now we can start modifying the code. We will need to add a single #include to the beginning of our .c file. Because we need Boolean variables, we must add #include <stdbool.h>. The new start of our .c file will now look as follows:

#include <SDL2/SDL.h>
#include <SDL2/SDL_image.h>
#include <emscripten.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdbool.h>

After that, all the #define directives will remain unchanged from what they were in the sprite_move.c file, as can be seen in the...