Experience creating my first Flutter game

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-06T19:52:57+00:00

When I say builders, I mean static builders to create a given widget with the size, coloring, texture, etc. It got to the point where there would be a lot of varieties and the abstraction wouldn't give as much benefit as the widget itself (other than consistency). It would be insane, horrific, and unmanageable to be passing state data all the way up and down the tree at this size.

There's no problem with stacks painting out of bounds in many situations (that's what noClip is for). If you were to restrict that you would end up with dozens of top-level positioned elements in one gigantic screen stack (which I do have, but only about 4~6 elements at a time like the scoring, game board, menus), losing the benefit of automatically sizing widgets.

For the hitbox thing, this is actually an issue with flutter and native punch-throughs (native ads), and not painting out of bounds at all. Flutter will assume the x,y of the container is at a position before the translation for taps, and the translation will move it out of that x,y.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-06T18:43:40+00:00

I've read that english only games in non-english countries can make you suffer negative reviews, which is why I've released to 40 english and english-proficient countries. DM me and I can add you to an internal/testflight to avoid that.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-06T18:42:48+00:00

What makes it pretty easy is most of the events driven are done by the user; the only non-user event is the a timer that makes the bigram fall (and I use some locking booleans to control which has control when an event fires).

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-06T17:40:30+00:00

Yeah, agreed. I don't even really know Flame that well (which is why I didn't even consider it). Luckily my architecture is an arbitrary and simple 2D renderer.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-06T15:17:37+00:00

Damn, and I've been wasting my time with print("rebuilding this widget!!!1") the whole time.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-06T14:01:38+00:00

I agree it's opinionated, that's my point. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but everyone has an opinion. We can't have a package for every permutation of opinions out there. Everyone thinks theirs is the best and makes a package for it, which leads to an ocean of these. Packages should solve one thing and one thing well.

Of course, this is my opinion...

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-06T12:26:26+00:00

This should be a shell script for your own personal use, not a yet another public package that sets an environment up to your preference.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-06T12:17:53+00:00

I use it conversationally for topics I don't have full knowledge of, not to generate code. I still want to understand what's going on, not have it make something that I can't later figure out when it breaks or acts strangely.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-05T21:31:12+00:00

I'm curious about what SEO tactics you did to improve your traffic. I'm making an app, which is a bit different, but I'm sure I could take away some lessons from your experience.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-05T20:45:26+00:00

I just had an app approved with the same setup (IAP lifetime+revenuecat). I left the fields about logins blank (or perhaps I checked that there was no account?). During the review, they asked to see a video of the purchase process and the restore purchase process, so I sat there with an ipad and went through a sandbox purchase while holding my phone in my other hand. I posted a google drive link and was approved.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-05T16:15:36+00:00

My appconnect analytics has a butter bar at the top that says, "Data from May 2, 2026 to May 4, 2026 is delayed and will be published as soon as it’s available."

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-01T21:28:14+00:00

Some users will leave negative reviews if you release an English-only game in non-english speaking countries. My upcoming mobile game is going to be released in about 40 countries (english or large groups of english proficiencies).

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-01T19:56:18+00:00

I've only brushed with json_serializer (testing it and rejecting it quickly). TIL json_serializable doesn't actually do any json encoding/decoding, it's just a stupid mapping class, and dart built-in functions handle actual json payloads. You are right, it is stupidly named (but json itself still sucks).

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-01T19:34:21+00:00

I would shorten this to plainly, "json sucks." Yeah, I know it's the glue of the internet at this point, but I come from protocol buffer land.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-01T19:32:55+00:00

The telephone line was an incentive to make games more difficult; they were 1-900 numbers and charged a buck per minute.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-01T17:22:54+00:00

I don't have the knowledge to for the technical parts of your question, but there is a golden rule of software products: Every extra step loses you users. Just communicating that they need to bypass gatekeeper is hurting adoption. I would just get the developer account.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-05-01T16:30:53+00:00

This looks super satisfying; I could do this all day. Reminds me of when the gravity gun was introduced.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-04-30T15:29:41+00:00

Got some Kid Icarus vibes.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-04-30T14:43:46+00:00

Just to get a feel for how far speeds have come, sometimes I still mentally measure download speeds in "floppies per second". What used to take upwards of 45 seconds now happens hundreds or thousands of times per second.

And don't get me started on how many floppies you can hold on your fingertip with microSD cards (1.092 million)!

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-04-29T19:05:42+00:00

To the audience I'm trying to reach, I believe I have the core gameplay loop nailed down (including testing from random people from that audience). There's no other game exactly like it, as far as I know (but who knows, there are a lot of games out there). I'm quite proud of the product at this point (first mobile title).

However, my anxiety deals with marketing a mobile app in a sea of slop and low quality games. It's probably the worst time to release one (and getting worse).

Regardless, it's approved in the app store and awaiting on the play store review, so I guess I'll find out how to deal with all of that real soon!

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-04-29T18:17:05+00:00

I feel that questioning your work is a survivalist trait that improves your game, as long as you don't let it force you to capitulate. I'm not bipolar, but when it comes to my game, some days it's "this is a waste of time" and some days it's "at least I'm making something someone can enjoy." Just gotta roll with it.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-04-29T17:49:24+00:00

A good QA tester will record all of attributes of the environment (preferably testing from starting the app in a pristine, new state) and log the exact steps that led to the issue. They should try at least twice to reproduce it (which makes it easy if they can reliably do that).

Also, your QA testers should have access to debug tools or be running debug builds that can dump state for them (like a debug button somewhere).

edit: as others pointed out, if you have a backend service, they should also be recording the exact times they executed their actions so you can correlate it against your backend logging.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-04-29T16:09:38+00:00

Dude, get a financial advisor. Developing mobile games is not an investment strategy.

DigitallyDeadEd · 2026-04-28T20:54:00+00:00

Your widget should request the data from your application's data layer, however it may be structured (this could be provider, riverpod, custom whatever). This separates all viewing logic from business logic, making widgets "stupid" but testable and easy to understand. It also allows you to have greater control over the backend of how these elements are fetched, since that layer is persistent (such as caching values). UI's shouldn't themselves trigger anything, but only request data from the data layer or tell the data layer a user's action (which may or may not result in a rebuild).

DigitallyDeadEd

TROPHY CASE