u/DigitallyDeadEd

I took some time off from the corporate world to focus on making my word game, which I would describe as what you get when you combine Tetris and Scrabble, with relaxed gameplay (unless the timer is on!). It's steeped in a nostalgic typewriters and journalism theme (I thought I would be a journalist when I was growing up) and has unique gameplay that I've not seen in another title. You can slide, rotate and then drop pairs of letters to make words on the board, and tap to clear created words before you fill the board up.

The career mode also has a lot of gameplay modifiers to help boost your word building creativity (for example, maybe the words have to start with the letter P).

I would be grateful if you would give my handmade, sophisticated time-waster a try! Happy to answer any questions about the process or the game, too!

Apple AppStore Link

Google Play Store Link

Hello r/FlutterDev (sorry for this rambling post),

This is my first foray into Dart and Flutter, and of all things I made a word game (but I feel is unique: it's like Tetris married Scrabble and you drop bigrams). This isn't some AI slop word game, which unfortunately I'm competing against a flood of. I spent a lot of time to make it pretty rich and not just a bunch of UI boxes, and I'm pretty delighted with the 2D performance for the hundreds of widgets live on a screen. I probably have some extraneous re-builds I could optimize, too (more below).

For context, I'm typically a backend engineer doing telephony/RTC, fraud/abuse big data, and high availability scalable systems. I've been programming for decades and worked at a few startups (and the G for 13 years). I've done a little CSS here and there, but this is really my first large project with non-engineering UX. I'm proficient in python, java, cpp, perl (I know, I know), and with this now dart.

Things I liked:

* Dart is relatively straight forward with my background (although the single-threaded event loop is a bit odd).

* Flutter composition is very intuitive after a while.

* I was very impressed at how far you could take animations with implicit or tweens and little hacks like using onEnd (though I have controllers for a few things).

* Hot reloads FTW.

Things I didn't like (or don't know better):

* I wish there were better ways to abstract Widgets; I ended up with builders that took almost as many arguments as the widgets themselves at this level of detail.

* I couldn't easily control how widgets would get clipped in some instances (even with ClipBehavior.noClip). In one instance I had to use RTL on a Row to ensure the left widget would stack over the right one.

* Matrix4 transformations of stacks with many elements can lead to some funky glyph rendering and hitbox issues (especially if there are native punch-throughs).

* Admob totally sucks and seems to destroy the Navigator stack at random.

* json_serializable is a joke and boilerplate nightmare that I ejected after a few days (I used proto3 with simpler toProto/fromProto methods instead, which were handy to deepCopy objects since dart does not support this easily).

* I didn't contemplate Flame because I thought my game was going to be simple enough. Maybe that was a mistake.

Architecture:

* The game logic is purely dart. At build time, python scripts build a byte prefix-trie for the word list and an sqlite asset that contains the offline word definitions from a Wiktionary dump.

* Vanilla flutter for the visual layer and a monolithic Provider (broken into many partof's) for the game state. This is where my excess rebuild issues stem from, and I should have broken my Provider up to multiple singletons dedicated to specific widgets (I'll refuctor that later).

* The game state is constantly written to sqlite using timestamped proto3 serialization, which has been resilient (pause and play at any moment).

I'm sure I did a lot of other things wrong, but I'm pretty happy with the result, so I give a thumbs up for this Dart+Flutter experience.

Shameless plug if you want to visually see how much I squeezed out of Flutter alone (mods, please delete if you think the post does not merit it):

Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/writers-deadline/id6760240814

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.digitallydeadgames.writersdeadline