Building a flappy dragon game in Rust.
- Error cmake is not installed.
- Error pkg-config is not installed
- Error fontconfig is not installed. After installing these applications cargo clean and run cargo build again.
For games to operate smoothly they run in a Game loop. The Game loop initializes windowing, graphics and other resources. Subsequently, it runs every time often more than 30 to 60 times per second. Each time it calls a tick() function.
bracket-lib is Rust game programming library. Its designed as a simplified learning tool abstracting away more complicated aspects of game development while retaining concepts required for complex games. It includes a family of libraries including random number generations, geometry , path-finding, color-handling and common game-development algorithms. bracket-terminal is the display portion of bracket-lib. It provides an emulated console. It can work with various rendering from text consoles to web assembly including OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal.
The game loop runs by calling your application's tick() function with every frame. The tick() function does not know anything about our game. So, we need to store the current status of our game which is referred to as the Game State. Everything we need to know to preserve between frames is stored in the Game State. The state represents the snapshot of the current state of the game. Bracket-lib defines a trait for the games state structures known as GameState. GameState requires that the object implement a tick() function.
The first version includes very basic play where the player is presented with a menu. Once the player decides to play the game the player's dragon represented with the @ sign will continuosly be falling down because of gravity. The player needs to keep on pressing the space bar button in order to battle the gravity and prevent falling to the end of the screen. If the dragon hits the end of the screen the game ends.
The second version includes adding an obstacle to the game play. Once the game starts, an obstacle is presented with a gap and is moving towards the dragon. The player has to keep on flapping / falling down so that the dragon does not hit the obstacle and safely passes through the gap in the obstacle. As soon as the obstacle reaches the left most side of the screen a new obstacle is rendered and the score of the player is incremented by 1. If the player hits the obstacle the game ends.
