I Built a Block Puzzle Game with Flutter — Here's What I Learned

Basem Shaaban Mohamed — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:04:40 +0000

After shipping my first game, Baron: Tower Siege, I needed a change of pace. Tower defense games are all about systems colliding — waves, upgrades, pathfinding. For my second game I wanted something simpler on the surface, but just as tricky underneath. So I built a block puzzle game.

Puzzle: Block Blast is a classic block puzzle: drag colorful block pieces onto the grid, fill rows or columns to clear them, and keep the board alive as long as you can. Clean UI, fully offline, no nonsense — the kind of game I actually like playing in waiting rooms and during long calls.

Here is what building it with Flutter taught me.

1. Grid rendering is deceptively simple

A puzzle grid looks easy — it's just squares, right? But once you are repainting the board continuously during a drag, every dropped frame shows. I learned to keep the grid rendering dumb and cheap: precomputed layout values, minimal widget rebuilds, and CustomPainter for the parts that had to move fast. The real lesson: profile on a low-end device early. My mid-range phone forgave everything; a cheap device did not.

2. Game state with Provider held up better than I expected

I used Provider for the game state — board cells, current pieces, score, game-over checks. Honestly, I picked it because I already knew it from regular app development, not because it was the "correct" game architecture. It worked fine. The key was keeping the state model separate from the UI: a pure Dart class holding the board and the rules, with widgets just listening for changes. No framework magic, no over-engineering.

3. Small animations make or break the feel

Clearing a row with no animation feels broken. I added simple scale and fade animations when lines clear, and a subtle bounce when pieces snap into place. Nothing fancy — Flutter's built-in animation widgets were enough. The takeaway: players feel polish through motion, not through more features.

4. Keeping the APK light is a discipline

It is tempting to pull in a package for everything. Every dependency adds weight and build complexity, so I kept the list short and used Flutter's built-in widgets wherever possible. The result is a small, fast APK that installs in seconds — and that matters for a casual puzzle game, because nobody waits around for a huge download just to try a puzzle game.

Closing thoughts

This is very much a living project. I have a list of ideas — more game modes, better piece previews, maybe a daily challenge — but first I want to hear what real players run into.

The game is free on Google Play, so if you like puzzle games, try it and tell me what you think:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mbs.puzzleblockblast

And if you've shipped a game with Flutter yourself, what surprised you most? I'd genuinely like to know.

I built a tower defense game with Flutter — here's what I learned

Basem Shaaban Mohamed — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:56:39 +0000

Hi! I'm Basem Shaaban Mohamed, a solo Flutter developer from Egypt. I've been working with Flutter for about 5 years and have 8 apps published on Google Play.

I built Baron: Tower Siege, a tower defense game, using Flutter and the Flame engine — the stack I know best.

What's in the game

🗼 10 tower types (archers, cannons, mages…)
👹 9 enemy types (goblins, orcs, wolves, flyers, dragons)
⬆️ Tower upgrades up to level 4
🐣 A Monster Farm — hatch and train monsters
🗺️ Chapter maps across forest, desert, snow, volcano and swamp
🎮 Multiple game modes and daily rewards

Try it and share feedback

The game is free on Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mbs.towersiege

If you're a developer or a player, I'd love your feedback — especially on balance, difficulty and performance. What would you build? 🗼

DEV Community: Basem Shaaban Mohamed