Flutter and Dart Cookbook

Chapter 17. Starting with Game Development

In this chapter, you will learn how to get started developing games using Flutter. We will explain the open source Flame package, which can be used for arcade-based games. Working with it resembles working with a game engine. As you might expect, Flame is open source and features a community effort to improve the codebase.

In this chapter, the basics of Flame will be discussed with some example code. Writing games can be tremendous fun, and it also teaches you a lot about the different styles of algorithms and data structures. However, getting started can sometimes be a challenge, so the first recipe discusses adding the Flame package. Beyond that, we cover the bare essentials to provide enough knowledge to build a basic 2D game. Learning how to add basic elements to the screen, write text, control user input, and perform some basic math will enable you to write your first games.

You will learn how to:

• Add the Flame package to Flutter

• Create a boilerplate application

• Add basic graphic primitives

• Add text rendering to a game

• Add audio

• Add sprites

• Add collision detection

If you are using DartPad, you can now use this editor, as it has been updated to support Flame. I find this a good way to quickly test game code, as this provides a good compatibility layer for testing Flame boilerplate code.

Unfortunately, this chapter will not cover the Casual Games Toolkit (CGT), as at the time of writing it didn’t exist. If you wish ...