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

Setting Flutter Web build parameters

If you run the game now using Chrome as the device, you will see you can resize the browser window and the page will resize, and components will be updated based on this, although when running the game, the performance isn't great. So, let's discuss how we compile the code for a release and deploy it via a web server for better performance.

When building a web release, we must pass a parameter to the flutter build web command to indicate the web renderer we want to choose from these two options:

  • html: Choose this web renderer if you are optimizing download size over performance.
  • canvaskit: Choose this web renderer if you are prioritizing performance and pixel-perfect consistency across platforms.

We will use canvaskit as performance is more important than download size nowadays, but just be aware that html is there as an option if you ever need it:

  1. Let's run the command that will create our release build...