· build log · 3 min read
The story behind Flutter Multiplayer
This article discusses the motivation behind the Flutter Multiplayer template.
My history as a Mobile App Developer
Hey there 👋, thanks for checking out the Flutter Multiplayer blog. My name is Emmett Deen and I am the developer behind this project. My motivation for this project dates back to high school where I built my first ever mobile games. I had always been a gamer growing up, so as I learned to program through my AP Computer Science course in school I decided to try and make some games for my friends to enjoy.
LibGDX
My mobile games were largely made on a Java framework that still exists today called libGdx. Almost everything I developed were very simple 2D games which were quite popular at the time. After seeing my friends enjoy some of my initial games, I immediately wanted to make multiplayer versions for my friends to play.
IO Games
At the time, IO games were starting to take over. The biggest of which was a game called Agar which you can still play today. Agar was initially a web-only game, and being so simple I figured I would try and build a mobile version for my friends to enjoy.
FooZe
Fooze was the name of my mobile version of Agar. I was one of the first people to release a version of this game and it blew up both literally and in popularity spectacularly. I had no experience building multiplayer servers and my development experience was fulled by my single APCS course. By a miracle I had a little server using socket’s deployed on an Amazon EC2 instance.
I went to sleep that night thinking my new launch would go like most with very little organic downloads. This particular launch went quite the opposite. There was so much demand that my server had crashed multiple times over night. I spent the next 48 hours doing my best to keep my horrible game server alive.
After about a month my game had gotten over 130,000 downloads. I was beyond excited and learning tons about mobile games and multiplayer game development. Unfortunately, my game came to a swift end. Miniclip bought the rights to the original Agar game and had release their own mobile version of the game. They then proceeded to have all similar mobile games taken down for copyright.
Even though the ending of this project was a sad one, the excitement of having over 100,000 people use something I built is what lead to my career in mobile app development.
So why Flutter Multiplayer?
Building multiplayer games can be very complicated and a lot of the basic building blocks can be used between games. Flutter Multiplayer aims to provide those reusable blocks. I believe this template will help enable more developers take the plunge with building their first multiplayer game, and I hope they will get to experience thousands of players enjoying their games together.
Flutter is also in a unique state. Not only has Flutter game development been picking up steam, but we now have some solid options to build the backend of our game with Dart. This means Flutter developers won’t have to learn a new language to make their games multiplayer.
Follow Along
If you are interested in building a multiplayer game for Flutter be sure to join our email list. We will be sending out progress updates & continue to add to our website as we build.