Casual Games Toolkit

The Flutter Casual Games Toolkit pulls together new and existing resources so you can accelerate development of games on mobile platforms.

This page outlines where you can find these available resources.

The Flutter framework can create performant apps for six target platforms from the desktop to mobile devices to the web.

With Flutter's benefits of cross-platform development, performance, and open source licensing, it makes a great choice for games.

Casual games fall into two categories: turn-based games and real-time games. You might be familiar with both types of games, though perhaps you didn't think about them in quite this way.

Turn-based games cover games meant for a mass market with simple rules and gameplay. This includes board games, card games, puzzles, and strategy games. These games respond to simple user input, like tapping on a card or entering a number or letter. These games are well suited for Flutter.

Real-time games cover games a series of actions require real time responses. These include endless runner games, racing games, and so on. You might want to create a game with advanced features like collision detection, camera views, game loops, and the like. These types of games could use an open source game engine like the Flame game engine built using Flutter.

The Casual Games Toolkit provides the following free resources.

• A repository that includes three new game templates that provide a starting point for building a casual game.

  1. A base game template that includes the basics for:

     • Main menu
     • Navigation
     • Settings
     • Level selection
     • Player progress
     • Play session management
     • Sound
     • Themes

  2. A card game template that includes everything in the base template plus:

     • Drag and drop
     • Game state management
     • Multiplayer integration hooks

  3. An endless runner template created in partnership with the open source game engine, Flame. It implements:

     • A FlameGame base template
     • Player steering
     • Collision detection
     • Parallax effects
     • Spawning
     • Different visual effects

  4. A sample game built on top of the endless runner template, called SuperDash. You can play the game on iOS, Android, or web, view the open source code repo, or read how the game was created in 6 weeks.

• Developer guides for integrating needed services.

• A link to a Flame Discord channel. If you have a Discord account, use this direct link.

The included game templates and cookbook recipes make certain choices to accelerate development. They include specific packages, like provider, google_mobile_ads, in_app_purchase, audioplayers, crashlytics, and games_services. If you prefer other packages, you can change the code to use them.

The Flutter team understands that monetization might be a future consideration. Cookbook recipes for advertising and in-app purchases have been added.

As explained on the Games page, you can leverage up to $900 in offers when you integrate Google services, such as Cloud, Firebase, and Ads, into your game.

Are you ready? To get started:

1. If you haven't done so, install Flutter.

2. Clone the games repo.

3. Review the README file for the first type of game you want to create.

   • basic game
   • card game
   • runner game

4. Join the Flame community on Discord (use the direct link if you already have a Discord account).

5. Review the codelabs and cookbook recipes.

   • Build a multiplayer game with Cloud Firestore.
   • Build a word puzzle with Flutter.—NEW
   • Build a 2D physics game with Flutter and Flame.—NEW
   • Add sound and music to your Flutter game with SoLoud.—NEW
   • Make your games more engaging with leaderboards and achievements.
   • Monetize your games with in-game ads and in-app purchases.
   • Add user authentication flow to your game with Firebase Authentication.
   • Collect analytics about crashes and errors inside your game with Firebase Crashlytics.

6. Set up accounts on AdMob, Firebase, and Cloud, as needed.

7. Write your game!

8. Deploy to both the Google Play and Apple stores.

For Google I/O 2022, both the Flutter team and Very Good Ventures created new games.

• VGV created the I/O Pinball game using the Flame engine. To learn about this game, check out I/O Pinball Powered by Flutter and Firebase on Medium and play the game in your browser.

• The Flutter team created I/O Flip, a virtual CCG. To learn more about I/O Flip, check out How It's Made: I/O FLIP adds a twist to a classic card game with generative AI on the Google Developers blog and play the game in your browser.

Once you feel ready to go beyond these games templates, investigate other resources that our community recommended.

The following codelabs and guides were added for the Flutter 3.22 release:

Low-latency, high-performance sound

In collaboration with the Flutter community (@Marco Bavagnoli), we've enabled the SoLoud audio engine. This free and portable engine delivers the low-latency and high-performance sound that's essential for many games. To help you get started, check out the new codelab, Add sound and music to your Flutter game with SoLoud, dedicated to adding sound and music to your game.

Word puzzle games

Check out the new codelab, Build a word puzzle with Flutter, focused on building word puzzle games. This genre is perfect for exploring Flutter's UI capabilities, and this codelab dives into using Flutter's background processing to effortlessly generate expansive crossword-style grids of interlocking words without compromising the user experience.

Forge 2D physics engine

The new Forge2D codelab, Build a 2D physics game with Flutter and Flame, guides you through crafting game mechanics in a Flutter and Flame game using a 2D physics simulation along the lines of Box2D, called Forge2D.

Optimize loading speed for Flutter web-based games

In the fast-paced world of web-based gaming, a slow loading game is a major deterrent. Players expect instant gratification and will quickly abandon a game that doesn't load promptly. Hence, we've published a guide, Best practices for optimizing Flutter web loading speed, authored by Cheng Lin, to help you optimize your Flutter web-based games and apps for lightning-fast loading speeds.

Check out the following videos:

• Building multiplatform games with Flutter, a talk given at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) 2024.
• How to build a physics-based game with Flutter and Flame's Forge2D, from Google I/O 2024.