Book Image

Building Games with Flutter

By : Paul Teale
Book Image

Building Games with Flutter

By: Paul Teale

Overview of this book

With its powerful tools and quick implementation capabilities, Flutter provides a new way to build scalable cross-platform apps. In this book, you'll learn how to build on your knowledge and use Flutter as the foundation for creating games. This game development book takes a hands-on approach to building a complete game from scratch. You'll see how to get started with the Flame library and build a simple animated example to test Flame. You'll then discover how to organize and load images and audio in your Flutter game. As you advance, you'll gain insights into the game loop and set it up for fast and efficient processing. The book also guides you in using Tiled to create maps, add sprites to the maps that the player can interact with, and see how to use tilemap collision to create paths for a player to walk on. Finally, you'll learn how to make enemies more intelligent with artificial intelligence (AI). By the end of the book, you'll have gained the confidence to build fun multiplatform games with Flutter.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Game Basics
5
Part 2: Graphics and Sound
11
Part 3: Advanced Games Programming

Navigating with key events

Our game already allows the player character to be controlled with either the joystick or touch events, but for websites, a more common method would be to use the keyboard to control the character.

In this section, we will add keyboard control as another option, so let's get started.

To listen for keyboard events in the game, we first have to tell our game that some of our components will listen for keyboard events:

  1. Open the main.dart file and change the class definition to include the HasKeyboardHandlerComponents mixin:
    class GoldRush extends FlameGame with HasCollidables, 
      HasDraggables, HasTappables, 
        HasKeyboardHandlerComponents {
  2. Add the following input import at the top of the same file:
    import 'package:flame/input.dart';
  3. Open the george.dart file where we will listen for keyboard events and change the class definition to add the KeyboardHandler mixin:
    class George extends Character...