When we began to consider all of the developments of games on Flutter, the light bulb in our heads went off with the notion of creating a game in Flutter. Is it conceivable? Is Flutter truly powerful enough to make a full-fledged mobile convertible video game?
To cut a long tale short, yes, we can! In Flutter, we can create our own canvas-based 2-D game. In reality, every software engineer fantasizes about making their own game at some point in their lives. And because of the way our minds are structured, we often begin a project with something we are already familiar with or by learning it by knowing what everyone else is using. You may have observed that the Flutter Frameworks aggressively support developers with their tools and enable short implementation times with organized and straightforward code. But how much has the game development framework progressed?
The first thing common in every video game is that they’re interactive in nature, meaning that the player can swindle around with it and perform actions and/or movements. The next three things that we would usually find in all the game are-
- A Game Engine– A game engine is essentially a program or a set of programs that consists of fair logics like physics, renders, and collisions, and so forth. It also provides every fundamental thing to build a game from very scratch.
- Characters– Characters definitely play a very important role in the game and are objects that make up the game world and interact with it using commands issued by the player.
- Game Logic– Game Logic is the logic, around which the entire game revolves. And do remember! every game has a goal that needs to be attained, and there’s a certain way of accomplishing it and that is what a Game Logic mainly about.
Understanding the Game Loop
Basically, there are two main methods based on which a game is built-
- The render method– This method makes the canvas easy to draw something over it, maybe a sprite.
- The update method- This method has to endure a time input that helps in moving on to the next state.
So, the render and the update method both work simultaneously to make the game move through states and make it all seem like a seamless process. These states could be a thousand in number and their ability to translate through each of them is where the real magic happens.
Flutter’s top game engine is Flame
2D Graphics
If you are willing to create a simple game out of graphics and some controls, then the simple controls, assets, and some animations from Flutter will probably be enough for us. You do not need any extra plugins and packages for this.
Let’s give a massive shout-out to Luan Nico, as he was the one to create this amazing Flutter Game engine and named it appropriately because it’s fire!
The Flame is Flutter’s top game engine as of September 2019. It is an efficient platform with convenient APIs that helps us to avoid executing a game loop and component abstractions by ourselves, it also serves the best help by conveniently embedding itself somewhere within your widgets tree. The flame is a 2D engine for simple games in Flutter. The key principle of the engine is the game loop, is that it comprises of render as well as update. This cycle makes sure that the objects that are brought to the screen via canvas are updated and displayed. Drawing the UI with canvas is also Flutter’s strength, which makes the engine with 60 FPS just as fast as a normal Flutter app.
You also get to experience the standard functions like audio, animation, sprites, inputs (tap, drag and drop, and keyboard), particle effects, and physics. And this is all that you will need for the first small game projects.
The main goal of Flame is to provide a complete set of out-of-the-way solutions for the common problems every game developed in Flutter will share.
3D Graphics
When it comes to complex 3D programming, Unity is the one thing you won’t be able to escape. This is a plugin that creates a widget representation of the Unity render environment. So you want to learn another programming language and gain experience in a different setting, which may cause the project to become more complex for you as a sole flutter developer.
What if there were four such Flutter Game Engines to select from, in addition to Flame? And each of them has the potential to accelerate and simplify your development?
Well! You’d feel compelled to learn more about them.
Sprite Widget
Sprite Widget is a Flutter toolkit for creating complex, high-performance animations and 2D games. Sprite Widget can be used to create nearly anything, from an animated icon to a full-fledged game.
The sprite rendering tree is housed within a widget that appears to be mixed in with other Flutter and Material widgets.
Quill
A lightweight Flutter game engine can be of great help when you need to keep your game simple by only using feathers and quills!
The main idea behind using Quill is to give you full control over your game or application.
Feathers
Only feathers are used by a lightweight game engine. And the primary idea behind using feathers is to offer you complete control over your app by simply allowing you to build the components you want for the feathers you create.
Flutter Unity Widget
Although not a full-fledged Flutter game engine, a Flutter unity 3D widget can incorporate Unity in Flutter.
You can also create intriguing gaming features for your app in Unity and have them rendered in a Flutter app in both full screen and embedded mode.
As a result, the Flutter Game Engine allows us to make games quickly and save you significant time while developing a game. It enables developers to publish and participate in the development of flutters packages. The Flutter game engine list was ranked based on package health, total score, and ease of maintenance.
Write it yourself
Yes, this may be a significant paradigm change, especially if you come from the fertile land of modern JavaScript, where NPM’s more than a million packages are readily available. However, Dart is not yet there, and you may find yourself in a scenario where the things you require have not yet been written by anyone else in the entire globe.
The benefit of this is that it will allow you to broaden your engineering knowledge in unexpected ways. One thing to keep in mind is that if you’re looking into Flutter for game development, you’re probably not frightened of being an unknown, so go ahead and write it yourself!
Complete Control by Flutter over what’s Displayed on the Screen
By lowering the wave function of this statement, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you truly control every pixel on the screen, but there’s not much Dart code left that can use the common Flutter APIs or Widgets. However, regardless of the quantum phenomenon, reality would end up being in both states. Flutter and widgets for in-game UI, and Canvas and custom painters for situations where _complete_ control is required. As a result, you will still benefit from the ease of Flutter APIs for actual interfaces, but you will now have complete access to a canvas for actual game view.
Monetisation
Where you might know that when it comes to money, the developers don’t want to be left empty-handed. Here there are three different concepts namely,
- selling the app
- advertising
- or an in-game shop
Selling the program should be the most straightforward option because you already selected the price when uploading and have no additional development work to do. If you want to advertise your app, you can look at the official Firebase package or a simple package from a pub developer.
The final alternative is to work through an in-game shop; however, there are options to carry out the implementation through an official package. Although the box is currently in development, it should already cover the most popular functionality of both the Android and iOS platforms.
Conclusion
Flutter is not inferior to other frameworks in terms of game production, and its structure also provides numerous advantages in terms of performance and handling. If you’re interested in the development, it’s worth looking in this direction. After all, if developing games with flutter is an adventure, then writing an adventure game is an adventure multiplied by two.
