I've been making games with #Flutter on and off for about 2 years now, but more seriously since January. A mishmash of what I have learned so far: 🔥 Flame is well maintained (by @BlueFireOSS ). 🏗️ You can use arch concepts from apps, such as flutter bloc, for the logic of your games. 🟦 To make level backgrounds, Tiled is excellent (by @TiledApp ), and there is a flame package for it. 💥Collisions and hitboxes are hard to reason with sometimes. Hand drawing stuff helps a lot! 📱💻 Scaling your game world to the screen can be tricky (eg phones vs tablet). It needs even more thought than adapting an app to different screen sizes IMHO. 🥪 Stack is your friend. You can trigger all your menus and overlays using bloc, and display them with a stack (with your game view at the bottom of the stack). ➰Do not do complicated calculations in your render loop. The good thing is when you do, you will quickly find out you messed up, because even on a good device, you will notice glitches. 🧪You can write widget tests for games but it's harder. So make sure you really separate your calculations/core logic and unit test the hell out of them. 🤫Things will go wrong and you want to avoid error messages in a game. So always check data and have fallbacks so you don't fail. The good news is unlike an app, the player usually doesn't know what the "correct" behaviour is supposed to be, so players will not spot all the bugs (as long as you don't have too many obviously). 🧑‍🦰🧑‍🦳👩‍🦱👩‍🦳 People have a wide range of experience with games, and their expectations are different, often based on their favourite games. Apps are often designed for consistency between apps, but games are not (even though there are some commonalities). So test your prototype with a wide range of users, because you want to make sure your controls work. 🏃 You do need onboarding in games, but it's different from apps, it needs to be part of the game itself. Players try a lot of games, they won't stick around after 15 seconds if they don't "get it". Unlike with apps, they don't "need" your game to do something, so they are very impatient. Do you make games with #Flutter? Share your takeaways, or simply write a one word comment, so I can follow you😊

It's interesting how we design holiday places with cars out of the way, but we seem incapable of doing that for where we actually live.

This week has been strangely productive 😅 ✅ GRIDLOCKED game published on Google play play.google.com/store/apps/d… ✅Improvements to "Mad Traffic Jam - a Match 3 game" published on Google Play play.google.com/store/apps/d… ✅Made trailers for both GRIDLOCKED and Mad Traffic Jam, learning to use @kdenlive (I love it!) #flutter

✅ Online game version now updated to v1.0 ➡️ Play Gridlocked at gridlockedgame.app/

Progress... ✅ Submitted for review on Google Play ✅ Approved! GRIDLOCKED is now available at play.google.com/store/apps/d…

Attention all maths and train geeks, this one is for you! This video shows the graph process to work out train timetables, invented in 1847 by Charles Ibry, a French railway engineer, and still used today! And, to boot, this graph was first used on the Paris-Le Havre train line, which is the line my hometown Rouen is on. Special kudos to @FryRsquared for making up station names between Rouen and Paris, I had a good laugh😂🤣 youtube.com/watch?v=NFLb1IPl…

Great news! @TheGoAheadGroup owns @Morebusco so will we see e-buses in BCP? One can hope 😀😀

As I'm preparing (rushing!) to release GRIDLOCKED for Android before starting a full time gig next week, I am spending a morning filling up forms for Google Play 😅😅 ✅ Phone screenshots ✅ Logo ✅ Feature graphic ✅ Trailer 🔃 Google Play forms 🔃 Production build testing 🔲Tablet screenshots #flutter The website will be updated with the latest build soon. I will keep the website live as a demo, but the app is better, as it saves your progress 😀 gridlockedgame.app/

Super interesting benchmark! And while I have started learning Godot to make 3D games, it feels right to keep using Flutter (and Flame) for my 2D games.

GRIDLOCKED Game Newsletter 3 is out! mailchi.mp/177687d21392/grid…

I'm not sure someone who is 28 is allowed to say "When I was young" 🤔Because, if you say that when you are 28, what the hell will you say when you are 48? 68? 88? 😂🤣 Anyway, this (still young) person provides good writing advice, a skill that many software devs need to grow (half of our job is communication).

Today, I had a day off freelancing so my plan was to release v0.10 of my game GRIDLOCKED, then play some guitar and keyboard and read before picking daughter from school. I ended up spending 6 hours testing and fixing bugs for GRIDLOCKED 😅😅 gridlockedgame.app/