Building Games with Flutter: The ultimate guide to creating multiplatform games using the Flame engine in Flutter 3

This book provides a reference guide to another tool to help build your own games. Building Games with Flutter by Paul Teale is based on using the Flame Engine to create Flutter games as a mobile or web application. Flutter bases on C++ and the Skia Graphics Engine to provide the majority of the support. The guide quickly takes one through all the code and requirements but doesn’t offer any expanded insight. The code samples and references are extensive with each chapter providing a quiz on the material. The sample game, Gold Rush, is easy to follow and one can readily identify how the material is progressing. The first section deals with basic architecture, the second with game construction and the last with leveling up the game through smart enemies and monetization. The book reads relatively quickly and is short at under 300 pages so one can quickly get to the essentials of building within the framework. Teale offers some sample folder and construct layouts to make sure all the right files in the right places as one borrows components from other repos or existing games. The second section introduces Tiled as a format editor to rapidly build and alter the underlying structure for the games. It does seem as though a lot of the requirements are fairly repetitive, especially when dealing with collisions and interactions between various objects. The links back to Skia help with much of this as sprites and other constructs are readily available and do not have ot be individually built by the user to be successful. The final section says advancement but really deals with what most consider to be the essentials of game, finishing the game, offering options with settings, and creating a path towards monetization. Further, the section touches on particle graphics and physics utilization. In a recent book on Blueprints for the Unreal Engine, the sections on these areas were hundreds of pages by themselves. The book provides a useful reference to Flutter to start but lacks some of the advanced tools to move ahead. If this is your first place building a game, it would make for a useful place to start but if you have been working games for a while, you might skip this one. All the basics are there for the transition but you will rapidly find yourself asking questions that don’t appear in the book. Not bad, but not the best game reference I’ve seen.

I'm always looking for more information to absorb when it comes to game development. This book hit the spot with a new Framework and Language applied to familiar game development concepts like the game loop and animation. Going into this book I did not know Dart or Flutter and the forward of the book makes it clear that it does not teach either. I would have to delve into some online training on both before I jumped into the book. After a bit of research and a few tutorials, I jumped into the book and found that most of the concepts presented were common enough to my game development experience with Unity that I had little trouble understanding the content as I continued to pick u the framework and language. At the end of the day, I think this book will be a great resource for future projects where I want to build a game that is cross platform between mobile and desktop experiences.

As a game designer and developer, I am always open to new tools and techniques. This book offers an interesting proposition, and that is to use the open-source UI toolkit, Flutter, by Google, to develop cross-platform games. Flutter is a relatively new tool, released in 2017, and using it for game development is a novel idea. While the book is under 200 pages, light for a programming book, it does pack a lot of great information in between the covers. There is an introduction to Flutter, Dart, and the Flame Engine. After that introductory content, game design and development with these tools is covered. The author provides enough information to get you started working with graphics, animation, audio, and even some game AI.

Half of the book is just the free tutorial that you can see on Raywenderlich website.

Very good book with some guidances, models, examples. the Flame Engine has some updates that impact in some examples into the book. Need it a revision.

This is a a very good reference book for building games in Flame. Though there are some online tutorials from which you can learn, this book provides a nice way to learn things easily. I'm only in chapter five, but I can tell you, it has been very good so far. Note that flame doesn't have very good documentation. So this book will help you immensely. A bonus point is the code which is available freely on github. Two points to note though: 1. You've to strictly follow the version mentioned in the code example. Flame keeps changing rapidly, and it can be very confusing to figure out what components/libraries do what, and which version to use. 2. You should have good understanding of flutter and android studio (or other IDE) before hand before you start building games with flame. It'll make your life lot easier.