Natalie Masse Hooper

I'm old enough to have had a couple of very different careers (urbanist then app developer). Currently transitioning to making games.

Find me on bsky

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

I've been making games with #Flutter on and off for about 2 years now, but more seriously since January.

A mishmash of what I have learned so far:

🔥 Flame is well maintained (by @BlueFireOSS ).

🏗️ You can use arch concepts from apps, such as flutter bloc, for the logic of your games.

🟦 To make level backgrounds, Tiled is excellent (by @TiledApp ), and there is a flame package for it.

💥Collisions and hitboxes are hard to reason with sometimes. Hand drawing stuff helps a lot!

📱💻 Scaling your game world to the screen can be tricky (eg phones vs tablet). It needs even more thought than adapting an app to different screen sizes IMHO.

🥪 Stack is your friend. You can trigger all your menus and overlays using bloc, and display them with a stack (with your game view at the bottom of the stack).

➰Do not do complicated calculations in your render loop. The good thing is when you do, you will quickly find out you messed up, because even on a good device, you will notice glitches.

🧪You can write widget tests for games but it's harder. So make sure you really separate your calculations/core logic and unit test the hell out of them.

🤫Things will go wrong and you want to avoid error messages in a game. So always check data and have fallbacks so you don't fail. The good news is unlike an app, the player usually doesn't know what the "correct" behaviour is supposed to be, so players will not spot all the bugs (as long as you don't have too many obviously).

🧑‍🦰🧑‍🦳👩‍🦱👩‍🦳 People have a wide range of experience with games, and their expectations are different, often based on their favourite games. Apps are often designed for consistency between apps, but games are not (even though there are some commonalities). So test your prototype with a wide range of users, because you want to make sure your controls work.

🏃 You do need onboarding in games, but it's different from apps, it needs to be part of the game itself. Players try a lot of games, they won't stick around after 15 seconds if they don't "get it". Unlike with apps, they don't "need" your game to do something, so they are very impatient.

Do you make games with #Flutter? Share your takeaways, or simply write a one word comment, so I can follow you😊

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

@carlafrancome Happened to me with a white tee-shirt at a tech conference. Thankfully, there were a lot of stalls with badges, so half an hour later, my tee-shirt had some badges in strategic places 😂

[Jamison Daniel @AntiquarianMuse]

Trump says there’s no empty seats and the cameraman goes rogue

Live fact checks at trump rallies now

[𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇 @grescoe]

THIS JUST IN:

Car ban begins in the center of #Paris.

Starting on Monday, Nov. 4, 2024: no through-traffic will be allowed in four central arrondissements on the Right Bank. (Home to the Louvre, Notre-Dame, and the Marais).

This is a big deal.

https://t.co/cVdnTrgLXz

[Pawan Kumar @imthepk]

History of Flutter :

2019-2020
•Flutter started with a modest market share, trailing behind React Native
•Initial adoption was driven by early adopters and Google’s backing

2021-2022
•Experienced explosive growth in adoption and usage
•Surpassed React Native to become the leading cross-platform framework
•Reached over 500,000 apps on Play Store

2023-2024
•Achieved 42% market share compared to React Native’s 38%
•More than 1 million apps on Play Store built with Flutter
•Over 2 million active developers in the Flutter community

Developer Adoption
•46% of developers now prefer Flutter for cross-platform development
•93% developer satisfaction rate maintained consistently

Community Growth
•150,000+ stars on GitHub
•155,000 questions on Stack Overflow
•104,000 followers on Reddit

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

@SEGVeenstra @KhalidWarsa Same when I go on our trampoline. I can follow her moves... I feel great... Then I go to sleep thinking I am 28... I wake up feeling 68 🤣

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

@SEGVeenstra @KhalidWarsa Yep, I know the feeling all too well! 😂

My daughter loves to dance. Sometimes, she gets me to do dance routines in the living room. I do my best to follow her moves, I lift her, and so on... Then, the day after, my 48 yr old body is like "nope, you're not moving today" 🤣

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

I pretty much have similar thoughts about it!

Food is way too expensive and, frankly, not very good.

Pushing people to use the app is bad for enjoying the experience as a family. I say this as an app developer - I love tech but it has its place, and in that setting, it spoils the connection between parents and children, as parents are glued to their phone trying to figure out where to go next.

Queues are long, they want people to buy some upgrade to skip the queues, but tickets are already expensive as they are.

In addition, I also think they should provide their own free bus shuttle to Windsor. The buses get packed, the timetables are pretty bad, so it's putting a lot of people off. I met several people who said they didn't mind getting the train to Windsor but seeing the bus connection from there to Legoland put them off so they opted for driving. If they can reduce their car park usage by just 10% by shifting those people to public transport, then they could build more things and make more money, so it would make business sense for them to encourage visitors to use public transport to get there. I think they are really shortsighted, from a business point of view, not to do it.

[FuckCars @FuckCarsReddit]

The European mind cannot comprehend this.

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

It's interesting how we design holiday places with cars out of the way, but we seem incapable of doing that for where we actually live.

[Carla Francome @carlafrancome]

GUYS! So last night we stayed at the Woodland village next to Legoland.

The huts were cute, as were the Lego figures. But the REAL magic was that there were footpaths all the way through, and NO CARS!

It completely transformed the atmosphere to being in a normal town. 🧵1/7

[Blue Fire 💙 @BlueFireOSS]

Flame just passed 2k thumbs up on Pub! 🥳
Next goal 10k stars on GitHub (700 left). 💫

[Ian Dunt @IanDunt]

Nearly every stop, an impenetrable 5 min description of all the tickets you may not use on this service, punctured by these mean spirited, aggressive ads. Also, the one loo doesn't work. When did someone decide to make trains an exercise in moral punishment.

[Dr Philip Lee @drphiliplee1]

Germany: here's a Deutschland Ticket, you can use any train except for the ICE. Enjoy it.

UK: Oh under normal circumstances yes this ticket would be valid BUT today is the first sunny Wednesday since two week after St Swithen's day. Prison for you, and we're killing your dog.

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

@SebastianRoehl @RevenueCat Make sure you don't spend the next month obsessively refreshing the app every 5 minutes instead of working on your own new app 😉

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

@SEGVeenstra Nice animation 🎊

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

This week has been strangely productive 😅

✅ GRIDLOCKED game published on Google play https://t.co/46oWI24LmR

✅Improvements to "Mad Traffic Jam - a Match 3 game" published on Google Play https://t.co/wYPpxroiYw

✅Made trailers for both GRIDLOCKED and Mad Traffic Jam, learning to use @kdenlive (I love it!)

#flutter

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

@dominik_hstein @RandalSchwartz It's same for Android apps: when given option, everyone uses Google sign in.

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

✅ Online game version now updated to v1.0

➡️ Play Gridlocked at https://t.co/ax7sJYav5n

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

As I'm preparing (rushing!) to release GRIDLOCKED for Android before starting a full time gig next week, I am spending a morning filling up forms for Google Play 😅😅

✅ Phone screenshots
✅ Logo
✅ Feature graphic
✅ Trailer
🔃 Google Play forms
🔃 Production build testing
🔲Tablet screenshots

#flutter

The website will be updated with the latest build soon. I will keep the website live as a demo, but the app is better, as it saves your progress 😀

https://t.co/bxoWGtK3RG

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

Progress...

✅ Submitted for review on Google Play
✅ Approved!

GRIDLOCKED is now available at
https://t.co/46gdxd7zUO

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

As I'm preparing (rushing!) to release GRIDLOCKED for Android before starting a full time gig next week, I am spending a morning filling up forms for Google Play 😅😅

✅ Phone screenshots
✅ Logo
✅ Feature graphic
✅ Trailer
🔃 Google Play forms
🔃 Production build testing
🔲Tablet screenshots

#flutter

The website will be updated with the latest build soon. I will keep the website live as a demo, but the app is better, as it saves your progress 😀

https://t.co/bxoWGtK3RG

[Natalie Masse Hooper @NatJM]

Attention all maths and train geeks, this one is for you!

This video shows the graph process to work out train timetables, invented in 1847 by Charles Ibry, a French railway engineer, and still used today! And, to boot, this graph was first used on the Paris-Le Havre train line, which is the line my hometown Rouen is on.

Special kudos to @FryRsquared for making up station names between Rouen and Paris, I had a good laugh😂🤣

https://t.co/IkeqHb7NIw

[Phil BuildTheFutureNow 🇺🇸🦅🌲💙 @PhilSustainable]

When a hurricane is coming, millions hit the road in cars. The result? Total gridlock. 🚗🚙🚗 People stuck for hours, barely moving, and sometimes unable to even get out of town.