diff --git a/STORY.md b/STORY.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e31ac9 --- /dev/null +++ b/STORY.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +# Story + +This is living document that describes the story of the project, from inspiration to solution. +When a website is available, this document will help curate it's content. + +## Inspiration + +I initially got the idea for this project after finding a video about another Pac-Man clone on YouTube. + +[![Code Review Thumbnail][code-review-thumbnail]][code-review-video] + +This implementation was written in C++, used SDL2 for graphics, and was kinda weird - but it worked. + +- I think it was weird because the way it linked files together is extremely non-standard. + Essentially, it was a single file that included all the other files. This is not how C++ projects are typically structured. +- This implementation was also extremely dependent on OOP; Rust has no real counterpart for OOP code, so writing my own implementation would be a challenge. + +## Lifetimes + +Rust's SDL2 implementation is a wrapper around the C library, so it's not as nice as the C++ implementation. +Additionally, lifetimes in this library are a bit weird, making them quite difficult to deal with. + +I found a whole blog post complaining about this ([1][fighting-lifetimes-1], [2][fighting-lifetimes-2], [3][fighting-lifetimes-3]), so I'm not alone in this. + +## Emscripten & RuggRogue + +One of the targets for this project is to build a web-accessible version of the game. If you were watching at all during +the Rust hype, one of it's primary selling points was a growing community of Rust-based web applications, thanks to +WebAssembly. + +The problem is that much of this work was done for pure-Rust applications - and SDL is C++. +This requires a C++ WebAssembly compiler such as Emscripten; and it's a pain to get working. + +Luckily though, someone else has done this before, and they fully documented it - [RuggRouge][ruggrouge]. +- Built with Rust +- Uses SDL2 +- Compiling for WebAssembly with Emscripten +- Also compiles for Windows & Linux + +This repository has been massively helpful in getting my WebAssembly builds working. + +[code-review-video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs_JewEeOo +[code-review-thumbnail]: https://img.youtube.com/vi/OKs_JewEeOo/hqdefault.jpg +[fighting-lifetimes-1]: https://devcry.heiho.net/html/2022/20220709-rust-and-sdl2-fighting-with-lifetimes.html +[fighting-lifetimes-2]: https://devcry.heiho.net/html/2022/20220716-rust-and-sdl2-fighting-with-lifetimes-2.html +[fighting-lifetimes-3]: https://devcry.heiho.net/html/2022/20220724-rust-and-sdl2-fighting-with-lifetimes-3.html +[ruggrogue]: https://tung.github.io/ruggrogue/ \ No newline at end of file