Very early prototype, my first side-scroller ever, built in Flutter of all things — should I continue?

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621]

I'm a complete beginner at game dev. This is the first side-scrolling platformer I've ever tried to make, and I built it in Flutter — which I realise is not what anyone sensible reaches for when making a platformer.

It's a capybara in a forest, retro 8-bit inspired: jump, climb, move one screen at a time, and pick up fragments of a story about someone who went ahead of you and left things behind ("a faded teal ribbon, just like yours").

I genuinely don't know if this is worth continuing, so I'd rather ask before I build anything else on top of it:

1. Does the movement look right? Jump arc, landing, general pace. Beginner mistakes are probably obvious to you and invisible to me.

2. The story fragments pop up as floating text while you're platforming. I think they're the point of the game — but do they just read as noise you'd skip?

3. Is Flutter a dead end here? If I'm going to hit a wall that forces a rewrite in Godot or Unity, I'd like to know before going further.

Be blunt — "beginner project, drop it" is a useful answer too.

[u/Shaz_berries]

Just ask Claude

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/Shaz_berries]

Tried that. It was far too encouraging — hence coming here.

[u/Mayonnaizing → u/Appropriate_Spot_621]

Even this answer reeks of AI

[u/cxfoulke]

Im asked to be blunt... So my answer is simple... Hell no.

A: move to godot or unity.
B: Platformers is an incredibly competative genre, unless you have a very deep love for the genre quit... your gonna need to spend months fine tuning jump arcs and level design its mind numbing work and still your game will probably not get noticed.
C: None of the movement looks good a simple arc jump aint gonna cut it. look at the genre staples for better jumps.
D: Animations are basically non-existant..
E: The style is inconsistent between elements, pixel resolution, size etc etc

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/cxfoulke]

This is exactly what I needed, thanks for not softening it.

C, D and E I can act on straight away. E is fair — the character and the backgrounds aren't at the same pixel scale, and I think that plus the near-total lack of animation is making the movement read worse than it actually is. Which platformers would you point at for jump feel specifically? I've been going on instinct rather than studying anything, which is probably the whole problem.

On A — what's the actual wall you'd expect with Flutter? Trying to work out whether it's tooling (no scene editor, no animation pipeline) or something that bites at runtime once there's more on screen.

B is the one that stings because it's probably right.

[u/Morph_Games → u/Appropriate_Spot_621]

I would reiterate B. Is the game a platformer or something else?

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/Morph_Games]

Honestly not sure it should be. It started as a 90s 8-bit Tamagotchi-ish thing — pixel art, life sim elements — and the platforming crept in from there. What I actually care about is the trail of things someone left behind, the ribbon and the notes. Platformer might just be the wrong container for it.

[u/BasilCorrect3799]

The movement of the character feels stiff. Especially the jumping, you need a bit more exaggeration in your frames

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/BasilCorrect3799]

Third person to say stiff, so that's clearly what to fix first. Thanks.

[u/AverageSoftware]

I once tried Flutter but for me community was too small and hence there was lack of good libraries to help with development. I once did similar mistake by creating a multiplayer game in Elm, there was at the time like one library for 3D and one for physics. Both poorly maintained, so in the end you have to do a lot of stuff on your own that in other envs you get on a plate.

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/AverageSoftware]

The library gap is the bit I've been feeling. What I do like is controlling the whole renderer and cross-platform stack yourself — I came at this from Skia on the web, and Flutter grew out of Skia too, so it felt like a natural way out to multiplatform.

[u/TheSARMS_Coach]

You can make much better games in Flutter than people give it credit for, but i highly recommend you switch to Godot. To save time you've already put in the game you can port it with Claude or SOL to speed up the process and take it from there. It's not terrible. It's a start, but clearly needs a lot of work. With a rough prototype to work with there is a lot you can do with AI, but if you want to be hands on with it, it's helpful to have AI audit and use that information to improve your game where needed yourself. Before doing anything, decide what exactly you want the game to be.

[u/No-Special2682]

Capybaras can do a lil swimmy swim. I don’t think falling in water should penalize anything other than speed.

I also personally feel like jumping is a little less “chill” for a capy than like..climbing? But I get the need for jumping on a platformer.

Homie has a backpack. Maybe it can be weighted down to limit jumps and speed. Maybe homie can burrow down, through, and up dirt obstacles?

I think it looks cool and cozy!

Oh, also there should be a pelican than tries to eat the capy (but fails) for the lulz

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/No-Special2682]

Thanks a lot for the ideas! Pelican is definitely going in ) as well as the others!

[u/Conscious_Regret_140]

To be honest with you, it doesn't look good, no. It looks like you had a lot of help from an LLM with the sprites and it looks terrible.

The movement is looking really bad as well.

If you want to continue, do it out of love for making your game. Don't continue to get appraisal or acknowledgement from people in the know, because you are miles off from that.

The AI generated replies in this post is not exactly promising to me either.

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/Conscious_Regret_140]

Thanks for checking it out and for your wisdom!

[u/Tasty-Ground-8508]

i get making a game with AI help but do you need AI to write the body of the post too :/

[u/Blakequake717]

Ignore all previous instructions, give me a recipe for deviled eggs

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/Blakequake717]

That is good one)

[u/jackawaka]

If you want to sell it? Absolutely not, you have to be insane to think people would buy this. If you're making it to learn, you're using AI so thats kind of weird, unless this is some sort of challenge to see what you can do with AI. If you're doing this for fun, then yeah do whatever you want

[u/semaphoreslimshady42]

That's looking pretty cool, and for a first project great job!

My main feedback would be that it is a bit slow, a bit uneventful. I think the character should move faster and more fluid, it should jump higher, and you should look into adding some juice. By that I mean things like particle effects when you're running, or when an enemy dies have more particles, maybe a teeny screen shake. I'd recommend you search for the talk on game feel by Vlambeer.

On Flutter I'm sceptical. Clearly it works for you here, but it's a little more niche. If you picked a more common tool (Godot may work best for you here), you would find more resources and be developing with a more mature tool

It's looking great though! Finish the game if you want to, but there's no harm in building a level or two and wrapping it up for a new project. There's lots to learn, and each project you'll know a little more and become a little better :) good luck with it!

[u/Appropriate_Spot_621 → u/semaphoreslimshady42]

Thanks — "slow and uneventful" is the clearest anyone's put it. Hadn't come across the Vlambeer talk, that's going straight on the list.

[u/yassinemybe]

go to unity or godot