Advancing Flutter Game Development With I/O Pinball

Technology
Flutter
Firebase
Flame

We teamed up with Google to build I/O Pinball for Google I/O ’22, a classic pinball game made with Flutter, Firebase, and the Flame game engine, to show what Flutter can do for games.

built with Google for the event: I/O ’22
leaderboard, kept in Firebase: Global
the full source code is on GitHub: Open source

01The ask

A pinball table to prove Flutter builds games too.

Google launched Flutter in 2017 to build apps for every screen, and it has partnered with us many times since to show what Flutter can do.

For Google I/O ’22, we built I/O Pinball together to show the power of Flutter for building games. It’s a classic pinball table starring Dash, Sparky, the Chrome Dino, and Android Jetpack.

02The build

Flame for the physics, Firebase for the bragging rights.

The game runs on Flutter, with the Flame engine handling the parts a pinball table lives on, the animations, the physics, and the collision detection.

Firebase keeps track of the scores for the global leaderboard. The full source code is open on GitHub.

Dash, Sparky, the Chrome Dino, and Android Jetpack, waiting their turn.

03What changed

Flutter got a game to point at.

The showcase

A Flutter game on the Google I/O stage.

I/O Pinball showed Google I/O ’22 what Flutter can do when the app is a game.
The scores

One leaderboard for every player.

Firebase holds the scores, so every game counts toward the same global ranking.
Open source

The whole table is on GitHub.

Any team can read how the physics, the animations, and the leaderboard fit together.

04If you’re next

What we’d tell a team building a game in Flutter.

01
Let a game engine carry the game parts. Flame handled physics, animation, and collisions, so the team didn’t write them from scratch.
02
Put shared state like a leaderboard on a managed backend such as Firebase from the first build.
03
Publish the source of a showcase, so other teams can see how every part of it works.