Hello everyone, at the start of the year, I’ve wanted to create something new with my developer skills. At this time I just wanted to practice and make software like in my software engineering studies, I wasn’t thinking that it would arrive sooner and with a complete game.
All changed in an early morning on 5 january 2024, with my mail check routine and a new mail “announcing the next Flutter challenge”. I was integrated and after reading the mail, a little “why not” started to grow and more and less than a week after, I started to code for this project.
Fluter ?
If you didn’t know, Flutter is an extremely powerful framework to build multi-platform software sharing the same code. Today, with the same codebase, you can make an application for the Web, PC (Windows, Mac & Linux) and smartphone (Android & iOS). It is powered by an OOP language named Dart which is not so hard to start using ! Seriously, even if you haven’t written a single line of code, you can find an impressive number of tutorials and examples to teach you to start coding.
The Flutter logo
The challenge
The Flutter Global Games Challenge is a hackathon presented by Google, the principal contributor to Flutter and Global Citizen, an organization fighting to defeat Poverty, defend the Planet and demand Equity. So our mission is to create a fun and simple game to encourage people to defend our planet on time. And for this challenge, we only have eight weeks to think, develop, test, and validate a game using Flutter. It may sound simple, but it is not, we have to create the game engine (or adapt some already available packages) and test all of the functionality as we want our game to perfectly work!
The ressources to help us
To help us on our journey to the creation of our own game, the challenge team shared some interesting ressources with a wide variety, from coding tutorial to sustainability game mechanics guide. So, my first step into this journey was to read a lot of documents and information on what is a sustainable game and how I can make our own.
The ressources are avaiable here : https://flutter.dev/global-gamers#resources
So... why not ?
In my job or in this project, the Flutter community has always been helpful with their tutorial, package or help on forums. So today, I’ve decided that another “why not” could be made. I will be documenting my journey to create my game with the hope that this can be useful for other developers in the future. I will try my best to explain all the steps that I will take, the successful and the less successful ones because we learn by making mistakes !
My team
After starting digging in the documents given, I have started to think that a team can be useful with the 8 week deadline and the amount of work ahead. In fact, it can be an error, but I am pretty confident for the development part. I already worked with Flutter in my daily work. But I’m more a backend developer than a Frontend, and I miss the artistic part. So, I have managed to get on my team a graphical artist that will handle all the artistic process for creating the image of the game. With her help, we can make a pretty unique and fun game ! But that’s not all, I have asked some developer friends to help me during the test phase. Theirs will not be part of the early development of the game to keep their open minded vision of the game. With that, they will be able to give us more realistic feedback and help on the final stage of the game.
Go !
So now, our team is complete, with one main developer, an artist and two testers we are ready to start our journey !
As I said earlier, this blog will not give you the best piece of code, or a tutorial to create a game. But the story of the creation of this game, with all the phases that we run through to create what at an early stage we decided to call ProjectOcean.