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 obstacles with pathfinding

In this section, we will discuss how to move our character from A to B when there are obstacles in the way. There are many solutions to this problem, but a common solution in games development that we are going to use is called the A Star algorithm.

The algorithm is an efficient way to calculate a route on a 2D grid. Remember, a tile map is a 2D grid that uses tile IDs to represent what is drawn on the map. We provide the algorithm with our grid coordinates for our start location (the current location of George) and our end location (where we tap on the screen), along with a list of grid coordinates for any obstacles that are in the way. The algorithm then returns a list of grid offsets that represent a path, which we can follow to navigate to our touched location while avoiding all obstacles!

Our initial challenge is that when we move George around, we are using pixels to represent the location, but the algorithm works in grid coordinates...