Capstone: Ship a Mobile Game

Not public yet. This page links to b12n-rogue-shooter, b12n-crystal-ball and the b12n-wikis pages they link to, which are still private, so those links will 404 for now. They're being opened up as the course progresses, and this note goes away when they are. The three raylib suites the rest of the course is built on (clj, jlt, jnk) are public today.

Before you start: this setup is heavier than everything else in this course

Every exercise so far has run on the JDK + Babashka setup from Phase 0. This capstone runs on ClojureDart + Flutter + the Flame game engine: a materially bigger toolchain (a Flutter SDK install, an iOS/Android/macOS build target, and ClojureDart's own compiler). Budget real setup time before you expect to see a window. Follow b12n-rogue-shooter's own README for the actual install steps, they're specific to that toolchain and would go stale fast if duplicated here.

Step 1, Rogue Shooter (start here, not Crystal Ball)

b12n-rogue-shooter is a scrolling shooter with no shaders, a gentler on-ramp than Crystal Ball. Read these, in order, once it's running on your machine:

  1. sprite-animation-cljd.md , sprite sheets, ^:async onLoad, and a real crash trap worth knowing before you hit it yourself: an untyped #dart [...] literal compiles fine and crashes at runtime against a typed Dart setter.
  2. timer-component-cljd.md , spawn/fire timing, two shapes of TimerComponent.
  3. batching-and-perf-cljd.md , draw-call batching (HasAutoBatchedChildren) and a live perf HUD (HasPerformanceTracker, FpsTextComponent), a different performance technique from Phase 4's object pooling (that cuts allocations and GC pauses; this cuts GPU draw calls), but the same underlying motivation: hundreds of entities at mobile-game scale hurts performance.

Then extend it: add a new enemy type, a power-up, or a second weapon. You don't need to build something original from scratch for this capstone, modifying a real, already-shipped game is the point.

Step 2, Crystal Ball (once Rogue Shooter feels comfortable)

b12n-crystal-ball adds one new thing on top of everything Rogue Shooter taught: a real GLSL fragment-shader pipeline (four shaders: firefly sparkle, fog, water reflection, ball glow). Read its index.md for the full page list, shaders are graphics-programming territory this course hasn't touched anywhere else, so go in expecting genuinely new material, not a repeat of Rogue Shooter's patterns.

Next

Once you've shipped something here (even a small extension), you can call it done, Where to go next has pointers for continuing past this course. Or keep going: Ship a Web Game is the fastest of the three capstones if you want another one under your belt, and Go Deep is there whenever multiplayer, 3D, or real test coverage at scale is what pulls you.