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.

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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
1
Part 1: Game Basics
Part 1: Game Basics
Free Chapter
2
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Flutter Games
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Flutter Games
Technical requirements
Working with Flutter
Using Dart
Summarizing the book
Creating a simple example animation
Summary
Questions
3
Chapter 2: Working with the Flame Engine
Chapter 2: Working with the Flame Engine
Technical requirements
Organizing the assets in your game
Adding the game loop
Working with components
Summary
Questions
4
Chapter 3: Building a Game Design
Chapter 3: Building a Game Design
Planning a game
Designing the game screens
Summary
Questions
5
Part 2: Graphics and Sound
Part 2: Graphics and Sound
6
Chapter 4: Drawing and Animating Graphics
Chapter 4: Drawing and Animating Graphics
Technical requirements
Drawing on the screen
Working with sprite animation
Moving a sprite around the screen
Colliding with other sprites
Summary
Questions
7
Chapter 5: Moving the Graphics with Input
Chapter 5: Moving the Graphics with Input
Technical requirements
Drawing onscreen controls
Moving our character with onscreen controls
Moving our character with touch
Summary
Questions
8
Chapter 6: Playing Sound Effects and Music
Chapter 6: Playing Sound Effects and Music
Technical requirements
Playing background music
Playing sound effects
Controlling the volume
Summary
Questions
9
Chapter 7: Designing Your Own Levels
Chapter 7: Designing Your Own Levels
Technical requirements
Introduction to Tiled
Loading a tile map
Adding dynamic objects to the map
Understanding map navigation
Detecting tile collisions
Summary
Questions
10
Chapter 8: Scaling the Game for Web and Desktop
Chapter 8: Scaling the Game for Web and Desktop
Technical requirements
Building the game for the web and desktop
Setting background music
Setting Flutter Web build parameters
Navigating with key events
Summary
Questions
11
Part 3: Advanced Games Programming
Part 3: Advanced Games Programming
12
Chapter 9: Implementing Advanced Graphics Effects
Chapter 9: Implementing Advanced Graphics Effects
Technical requirements
What are particle effects?
Animating with particles
Creating shadows with layers
Summary
Questions
13
Chapter 10: Making Intelligent Enemies with AI
Chapter 10: Making Intelligent Enemies with AI
Technical requirements
Making enemies chase the player
Navigating obstacles with pathfinding
Summary
Questions
14
Chapter 11: Finishing the Game
Chapter 11: Finishing the Game
Technical requirements
Wrapping up the game
Monetizing your game
What else should I learn?
Where to get help?
Summary
Questions
15
Other Books You May Enjoy
Other Books You May Enjoy
Packt is searching for authors like you
Appendix: Answers
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Why subscribe?

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Flutter Games

Welcome to Building Games with Flutter!

We will show you how to use Google's Flutter framework to build scalable games that work across mobile and web platforms. Flutter may seem a strange choice at first for building games because there are more established frameworks for making games, such as Unity or Unreal Engine, but a lot of these tools are very complex to learn and it takes a long time to start producing games with them.

Building on your existing knowledge of Flutter and Dart, we will take you through the steps needed to build a 2D game that will work across all supported platforms. Starting with the basics, we will build on this knowledge and gradually get on to more advanced game topics. By the end of the book, you will be able to make your own 2D games containing the following:

  • Animating graphics around the screen
  • Playing sound effects and music
  • Controlling your player with keys, joystick, or gestures
  • Detecting when graphics collide
  • Creating game level maps and navigating around them
  • Designing games
  • Scaling the game across different platforms
  • Advanced graphical effects
  • Intelligent enemies

We will cover the core concepts with examples and then build on this, chapter by chapter, gradually building up a full game that works across different devices. Each chapter will contain code samples to help learn the building blocks of game development, along with the code, image, and sound resources to build our complete game. The game involves the player navigating around a map and avoiding the enemies while collecting as much gold as they can.

In this chapter, we want to delve a bit deeper into Flutter and Dart and what features they have that make them a great choice for game development. This will give you an understanding of why Flutter and Dart can be used for fast, smooth games across many platforms.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Working with Flutter
  • Using Dart
  • Summarizing the book
  • Creating a simple example animation

We have a lot to cover, so let's get started!

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