Rive, once known as just an animation toolkit, has taken a big leap forward, transforming into a complete game engine. What’s exciting is that Flutter is the first framework that the developers of Rive have decided to integrate with!
Currently, support is limited to iOS and macOS (Apple Silicon) platforms.
Rive Renderer & GameKit
Ever wanted to take your game’s visuals to the next level? With Rive’s new renderer and game kit, you can do just that. It’s not just about improving simple in-game visuals like Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) or Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) anymore.
You can now craft entire gaming experiences where everything you see on the screen can be animated with Rive.
This tool can draw an incredible number of vectors on the screen, letting your gameplay run smoothly at a whopping 120 frames per second. Every element in the scene can move and shift without losing any quality.
Features
This is a package made especially for Flutter to help you create high-performance games. Here’s how it breaks down:
- Drawing the Vectors: The Renderer takes care of all the drawing, giving life to the vectors on your screen.
- Controlling the Animation Loop: It lets you manage the flow of all the Rive animations in your scene.
- Interacting with Animations: Want to change the animations on the fly? You can do that through state machine inputs.
- Accessing and Updating Components: You can easily reach and tweak individual parts of the drawing structure.
- Laying Out Your Scene: Position everything perfectly with precise layout tools.
- Making Development Easier: Keep an eye out for upcoming APIs that will simplify game development even further!
Rive Tutorials
- Tilemaps: The Tilemaps tutorial is all about using Rive’s Renderer to make a game’s world fully interactive and animated. By transforming scene components into vector elements, developers can create a 2D level using tiles, similar to a traditional sprite tilemap system. This offers an engaging way to design games, providing flexibility and creative freedom to animate and interact with every element within the game scene.
- Adding Keyboard and Mouse Interaction: Building a game with Rive GameKit? Since it’s created using Flutter, you can really amp up the interactivity. This tutorial is here to show you how you can bring in different peripheral inputs like the keyboard and mouse. So, get ready to make your games even more engaging with these cool additions!
Rive Examples
- Tappy Turkey: Tappy Turkey is a simple web game that demonstrates the use of Rive runtime APIs at a fundamental level. This game showcases the integration of multiple artboards, Rive files, and state machines on a single canvas to create an engaging scene.
- Find the Dog: This is a game designed for a Rive workshop. It demonstrates the process of integrating the Rive runtime into Flutter applications. The project includes a fully developed example as well as a basic example that participants can follow along with during the workshop or try out independently.