There has been a lot of hype around functional programming over the past several years. Pure functional programming requires all constructs to be immutable and functions to always return the same outputs, without causing any side effects, given the same inputs. At its best, this approach makes code safe (i.e. not error-prone) and easy-to-parallelize, a useful quality for running on modern multi-core processors or in the cloud. However, some schools of thought seek to use functional programming in all code to the greatest extent achievable, without considering the possibility that this strategy might have downsides. …
If you’ve ever tried to make a game with pixel art, perhaps you’ve run into this problem: how can you make your low-resolution pixel art appear crisp and clean when displayed at higher resolutions? The graphics need to be scaled up, so some sort of interpolation is necessary. The most common types of interpolation are “nearest” and “linear”, but these will cause your beautiful pixel art to look distorted or blurry, respectively, assuming a non-integer scale factor. Rendering a rotated sprite has the same problem. There are several approaches to address this. …
I’ve recently created a new website and finished an online game named Adventures of Pascal Penguin. One of the most unique things about this game is that it was written in Rust and runs in web browsers thanks to WebAssembly. WebAssembly has only been mainstream for about a year or so, so not many games have been created like this. I want to share a little about my journey with Rust: how I started with it and how I got to this point.
Game development has been a hobby of mine for a long time. Prior to mid-2015 when Rust…
