Last year saw a major update to the Flutter Casual Games toolkit. This week, Flutter made its debut at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, the game industry’s premier professional event, championing game developers and the advancement of their craft. Read on to see progress developers have made building games on Flutter, and what’s in store for the future of Flutter game development.
Since the launch of the Flutter Casual Games Toolkit, Flutter has made strong progress within the game development arena. More than 15,000 new mobile games have been developed with Flutter in the last 12 months.
Flutter has proven to be an appealing option for game apps of all sizes, empowering both first-time game devs like Tatsuya, who used Flutter to create Tinies Merge in his spare time and secured a spot as a top 20 finalist at Google Play’s Indie Game Festival, to the teams behind popular titles such as Trivia Crack, which has hundreds of millions of downloads across the globe!
Why Flutter for Games?
Flutter offers compelling advantages for 2D casual games, particularly interface-driven or turn-based titles. The fact that it’s open-source eliminates licensing fees, provides deep control over game mechanics, and grants access to a rich plugin ecosystem. Flutter’s “hot reload” feature accelerates development, while its optimized engine ensures smooth performance across devices, including browsers. With the ability to build once and deploy cross-platform, including iOS, Android, web, desktop, and Google Play Games for PC, Flutter streamlines your game’s reach. So, if you’re a game developer, don’t overlook Flutter’s potential — try Flutter for your next game and help us spread the word!
2024 and beyond: building the Flutter Game Development ecosystem together
In 2024, we’re dedicated to empowering you to create amazing casual game experiences with Flutter. We’ll focus on:
- Streamlining development: Expect expanded game development resources like templates, plugin-integrations, and in-depth guides to speed up your workflow and unlock Flutter’s game development potential.
- Expanding your reach: We’re working to make deploying Flutter games on the web and other platforms even smoother, opening up new audiences for your creations.
- Foundations for the future: While 2D mobile game support is our main focus, we are keen to explore 3D capabilities as a part of Flutter GPU effort. Follow some of our early experiments to see our progress.
A special thank you to the community
We are incredibly grateful to the community for your unwavering support and significant contributions, which have fueled Flutter’s remarkable growth in the game development space.
We are in awe of your work, and incredibly thankful for the many brilliant contributions, including:
- Luan Nico, Lukas Klingsbo, Erick Zanardo, Renan Araujo, Arron Washington, Pasha Stetsenko, Jochum van der Ploeg, Fernando Ultremare, DevKage (Flame): Your work on the Flame engine and its related projects has been transformative for Flutter game development.
- Rafael Barbosa (Bonfire): Your powerful and versatile game engine is a fantastic tool for building RPG-style games.
- Filip Hráček: Your templates and tutorials provide an invaluable starting point for many new game developers.
- Jeff Ward: Embedding Dart in other game engines opens up exciting possibilities.
- The amazing team at @VeryGoodVentures: Your beautiful games and willingness to share the best practices raise the bar for everyone.
- Abedalkareem Omreyh (game services), August, subhash279 (audioplayers), Marco Bavagnoli (Flutter SoLoud) and countless others who create essential packages: The foundation you provide is what makes complex and engaging games possible with Flutter.
This list barely scratches the surface of the talent in this community. To everyone we couldn’t name individually: your contributions are deeply appreciated, and you make Flutter a vibrant place for game development!
Meanwhile, we would also like to extend our deepest thanks to our developers who have launched games using Flutter. Your creativity and passion inspire us to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, making Flutter an even more powerful tool for developers worldwide.
Flutter’s journey as a game development platform is just beginning. We’re committed to growing alongside the community, listening to your feedback, and building the tools you need.
We can’t wait to see what you build!
