"Dart engineers exploring Stack Overflow 'Flutter gamedev' section", Photo by . Elena Zhuravleva Once upon a time every software engineer thinks of writing their own game. Being a card-scattering solitaire or zombie-mmo-survival-crafting madness, sometimes it could drive you crazy, how much you want to actually write that thing straight away right now. And the way human brains are wired, oh this awfully brilliant optimization machine, we often tend to start that project of ours with either something we already familiar with, or whatever everyone uses. The former was my choice, and it was exactly the period of my utter excitement with Flutter. Long story short, I've started writing a game with it and here's what I learned. #1: Dart community loves library names starting with "F". I understand that it seems like a far-fetched statement, but here's some numbers from : pub.dev And, in particular, there are (more than ) of packages which name starts with in particular. So there's a good chance that if you're missing something in dart ecosystem, try looking for the word :) 907 74% flutter "f" Data was collected with the following Puppeteer 🙌 script: puppeteer = ( ); alphabet = .split( ); { results = {}; browser = puppeteer.launch({ : [ , ]}); page = browser.newPage(); page.setViewport({ : , : }); ( char alphabet) { page.goto( ); el = page.$( ); count = ( el.getProperty( )).jsonValue(); results[char] = (count); page.screenshot({ : }); } .log( .stringify(results, , )); browser.close(); })(); const require 'puppeteer' const 'poiuytrewqlkjhgfdsamnbvcxz' '' ( ) => ( async let const await args '--no-sandbox' '--disable-setuid-sandbox' const await await width 1024 height 768 for let of await `https://pub.dev/packages?q=package%3A ` ${char} const await '.package-count span' const await await 'textContent' parseInt await path `pub/ .png` ${char} console JSON null 2 await #2: Flutter's top game engine is Flame 🔥 Another proof to statement above, is Flutter's top game engine as for September 2019. It is a library with convenient APIs allowing you to avoid implementing game loop and component abstractions by yourself, as well as allowing to conveniently embed itself somewhere within your widgets tree. However, Flame is still far way from even the engines considered "small" (like , or ) and light years behind from monsters like or . Flame great Phaser Pixi.js Babylon.js Unreal Engine Unity On the good side, Flame's simplicity is great in a way that allows you to simply read its sources and quickly modify your code to do what it supposed to do, instead of spending half of a day on a documentation and community portals to find . And their "Getting Started" does not invoke thoughts about black boxes and magic. At the same time, if you need something specific, , it's not there yet. thatMethodWhichDoesWhatYouNeeded guide be almost sure Disclaimer: i am not related to Flame game engine, opinion above is subjective. #3: Write it yourself Yes, this could be quite a paradigm shift, especially if you're coming from a fruitful lands of modern with readily available. is not there yet and you will end up in a situation where things you need are not yet written by anyone else in the entire world. Javascript NPM's more than a million of packages Dart Good side of this would be that it would allow you to expand your engineering expertise in ways you would never expect. One thing to note is that if you're exploring Flutter for game development, you're probably already not afraid of unknown, so all the way! WIY So be ready to write systems for level progression, inventory, settings persistence, and much more on your own. #4: Flutter gives you full control over what's displayed on the screen This is true, and a not , so sort of a quantum statement. at the same time image credit: Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell Collapsing the wave function of this statement, you'd observe yourself in a situation where you're really controlling each and every pixel on the screen, but there's not much Dart code left which uses common Flutter APIs, or Widgets. But at the same time, utilizing the framework's abilities for rendering, limits you in a multiple ways, so you will not get same level of control if stayed within the widgets framework. But, as in any quantum phenomena, reality would end up being in both states. Flutter and widgets for in-game UI and Canvas and custom painters for places where you actually need _full_ control. So you still get amazing convenience of Flutter APIs for actual interfaces, but get full access to a canvas for actual game view. #5: Full control is not full Yes, yes, i am sorry for such a stereotypical twist in the article plot, but if you're really considering using Flutter for game development because of its "Full control" over what's going on the screen, there are a few limitations you should be aware of. First of all, if you're seeking true power, you will likely end up working with Flutter at layer. You could find more information on Flutter's layered architecture in article. And oh boy, that layer . Between us, i wasn't ready for some of things which are happening there. Some of the limitations are: dart:ui Flutter: Through the abstractions forest 🌲 is Dart - Canvas contents could only be accessed asynchronously and only via bound . It means you can't copy whole contents of your game image after each frame, apply some transformation to each pixel and then render it back, i tried. PictureRecorder - You don't have access to full API with Canvas. So if you would like to do write some shaders for your game, it's not possible yet. Skia dart:ui - object doesn't allow you to access points data within the path, despite clearly having it available. dart:ui Path - If you want 3D scenes in your game, you will need to write all the projection logic yourself. It's possible, but it'll run purely on CPU, so it's not a great idea both in terms performance and time investment point of view. Overall, working with Flutter on that level it felt that there are API and implementation gaps where it's not directly applicable to 2D UI rendering, but at the same time, if your niche is a sprite 2D game, you will probably not be constrained too much. So should i even consider using Flutter for mobile games? Writing games with flutter is an adventure, writing an adventure game with it would be adventure squared. For me personally, i am enjoying both Dart and Flutter ecosystem as well as i'm not afraid to do a bit of geeky coding, like writing BMP encoder, or interpolator for transformation matrices. But that might not be applicable for you, so if you're looking for an answer if Flutter is feasible for writing mobile games, just like in hundreds of other blogposts, the answer would be quantum. if are : Yes at least two of these true You're doing it as a for and side-project fun experience You're and ecosystem enjoying Dart Flutter You don't mind some basic things programming from scratch if is : No any of these true You're looking for for your next product quickest possible way to market You in other technology stacks don't have any prior experience with game development So, in plain English, it's not ready for prime time yet, but it's definitely an interesting technology combo to explore and to track. Thank you for making it here! If you have any interesting story about writing game with Flutter, please drop a few lines in comments or write me to , i think we'll have something to talk about! av@av.codes And yeah, you won't see any shameless plugs in this post about my own game or anything :) Have a great time with Flutter (and Flame, probably)!
