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

Drawing onscreen controls

In this section, we will add a joystick and a button to the screen that will allow us to control the character and some text for showing the player their score. These three components will form part of our Heads-Up Display (HUD), which is part of the user interface, showing game information that is drawn over the other graphics in the game and remains in a fixed position. The type of information could be the player's health, the number of lives remaining, or, in our case, the game score.

We will encapsulate our HUD into a single component, which makes showing or hiding it easier. The HUD component will contain JoyStickComponent for controlling the direction that George moves; the joystick will work by dragging an onscreen circle within a larger circle in the direction you want to move. The HUD will also include HudButtonComponent, an onscreen button that the player can press to double George's walking speed, making him run.

We will connect...