In this blog post I hope to share a little bit about the event and the content presented in the keynotes and sessions. It was a big event, so I will try to highlight things that stood up more for me, and again, there were so much content, so different people had different experiences, and keep in mind that much that you will read here has my personal opinion printed in them!

The event

Google IO is a large event. Held at the Google Campus in Mountain View California, US, is where the company annually announces their new releases in end user products, like the Pixel phones/tablets/watches/etc and also their development platforms like Android, Flutter, Firebase, etc.

All keynotes and sessions are live streamed and made available afterwards in the event’s website which I really suggest checking out, most sessions are around 40 mins and they have cool content.

One thing that really caught my attention was the event organization. It was a two day event, and both days would follow a similar schedule: Breakfast, Keynote and a full day of sessions and workshops, with breaks at noon for a lunch and then again later in the day for snacks and dinner.

The main key note happened in the first day, where it was shared about Google’s releases focusing more in the product side, announcing many of the companies endeavors in the ML/AI area, while the developer key note went more in depth in the technical bits.

The event had different tracks: mobile, web, ML/IA and cloud. Each had its own area were demos were exposed and a stage where sessions would be held.

The staff would also organize different activities alongside the day, like giant jenga games in the middle of the grassfields and other cool games for people to have fun!

Overall I really enjoyed this experience, is an interesting event to be part of, you learn new things, have fun and meet new folks, which in my opinion were the highlight of the event for me, I finally got the chance to meet in person many of the community folks that I only knew online, as well as new people that I have encountered before. It is really a great place for networking!

Event focus

This is clearly the year of AI products, and for Google it is not different. Most of the releases announced in the event were ML/AI related, with heavy focus on Google’s main AI product, Gemini.

They announced new products in the generative area, like music, images and of course, text. Big improvements on Gemini, greatly boosting how much tokens it can process, and many integrations of Gemini with other products and tools.

Those who know me, know that I am not really an AI guy, so I will not go much in depth on it since it is not an area that have much expertise, but if you have interest and have not yet, be sure to check the main key note and developer key note available in the event website.

Flutter & Flame

Flutter didn’t got that many announcements. But the ones that were made, are amazing!

Kevin Moore and John Ryan made a session about the news on Flutter and although the whole content announced in the talk is awesome, two standed out for me:

• Macros
• WASM support on web

Macros is actually not really a Flutter feature, but rather a Dart one. It is a highly anticipated feature by the community, so much that when Kevin just said the word Macros on stage, the whole audience went on fire!

This new feature allow developers to “generate code” more efficiently and it will eventually replace build_runner in almost all the cases where it is used now a days, a bring a more robust option for meta programming on Dart!

Being a Language feature makes it blazing fast, and it make for a better developer experience. The feature is still in its experimental phase, so to use it today, you need to enable it by using a flag.

Many developers are already making experiments with it, a good example is data_class_macro by Felix Angelov, which makes use of Macro to add data class methods to classes, like copyWith, equals/hashCode, etc.

I can’t wait to see all the cool stuff that developers will make as Macros evolve in the language.

WASM support to web is also a big deal. Flutter when built for web, is compiled to JavaScript, now developers will also be able to be compile to Web Assembly, which means that Flutter web will run faster and better on the web platform!

This by itself is already exciting to a Flutter Developer, but being a game developer myself, this is specially exciting, Flutter and Flame games will gain a great performance boost without changing any line of code, just upgrading to compile to WASM will allow even more complex games to be written in the Platform!

On top of all that, Brett Morgan, Developer Relations Engineer for the Flutter team gave a great workshop about building a Flame games with the physics engine Forge2D. It was a great workshop, in which in just one hour, Brett showed how to build a small physics game from start to finish. I really suggest checking it out!

Firebase news

Firebase also got its fair share of exciting updates! They announced a new visual identity for their brand and a couple of new products for their ecosystem.

And one of those products really got me excited: Firebase Data Connect!

This is something that I have longing for for a long time! I love Firestore, but sometimes a Non SQL Database is not the best fit for certain data structure and you get yourself in need of a SQL database, and now you can use Data Connect for that!

What is even cooler is that Data Connect allows you to create your schema in a graphql like syntax, which a super friendly syntax. This is how a simple table would look like for example:

But what really made me go “Wow”, was that Data Connect has built in schema migration tools. Which is something that I have always missed in other SQL Database services, you had to come up with your migration process, tools, etc. But Data Connect already solves that for you, that is simply amazing!

I didn’t got time to play with it yet, so I can’t share much more other than these first impressions that I got from the session, but I am really excited to make some POCs with it and hopefully I will come up with additional blog posts about it!

Wrapping up

That is about it! Of course the event had way more content than I was able to capture in this article, like I said, it is a big event, we can experience just some part of it, so I really recommend checking out the recordings of the sessions and workshops in their site, and I hope that you enjoyed reading my opinions and impressions about this incredible event!

See you next time!

In my last update I talked a little bit about Stardustry, and the announcement of its Steam page. That project was my main focus back then, and by now I should have additional updates about it.

But oh well, life take turns. During the past months I had many important changes in life. Including changing jobs and moving to my new house, which were in construction for over a year!

All these changes played a role in how I organized my free time and my efforts at CherryBit projects. I will go through it a little bit, but I have basically paused Stardustry for a while, not cancelled, but paused.

Since it is a big project, I feel I couldn’t focus on it having so many things in my mind/life at the same time. I would not be able to focus, or more than that, endure the frustration of the slow progress of a longer term project.

But I am not complaining, on the contraire! I am incredible happy with the moving to my new house, and super excited with my new job! I am learning so much, I have been taken out of my comfort zone and facing incredible challenges with an awesome team!

Which leads me to share with you what I have been focusing in for the past weeks, and what I will focus for the ones to come!

At my new job, I am finding the need to learn low level programming, like C, C++, Rust, etc. I can’t say that I know nothing of this type of programming, but I am far, really far, from being experienced in that area, I mostly just did small programs, either to test stuff, or back in the day at college.

So I decided to put my focus into the learning of such type of programming, and thought, hey, I can learn low level programming, while doing Game Development!

I knew I wanted to start with C, it is a low level programming, but is the type that I had the most contact with. After a little bit of research I found out about raylib, a great C library to create games, which in some ways kinda resemble Flame, which made it easier for me to grasp it.

So I started to play with it, and eventually Orion: Under Siege become to take shape. It is scrolling shooter, written as if it were made for the original game boy, well, at least in terms of color and resolution limitation.

My goal is to finish and publish it, maybe on Steam, maybe on Itch, but mostly likely both. I have no idea how long I will take to finish it, I want to make it a shorter game, something like 5 or 6 stages, so I am hopping that this can be achieved in around two months, but we will see, it will be done when it is done, the real goal behind it is to learn low level programming, so I have no rush to finish the game.

I am of course not abandoning Game Development in Flame/Flutter, neither Stardustry, this is just a quick shift to learn something that I have been needing in work, and I am pretty sure what I learn in this project, will make me a better game developer, no matter which language or platform I code.

That is about it! Thanks for reading and following my quest, as always, feel free to reach me and see you next time.

Like I mentioned Stardustry’s development started in December last year, so by the time of the writing of this post I am already in (more or less) the third month of its development, and oh my, time flies!

For sometime now I already had a lot of the game in place, the basic mechanic, the initial set of screens (title screen, settings page, stage selection page), and some initial stages for the first campaign (yes, first since I intend to have several, well, at least a couple of different campaigns).

Setting up the Steam page for the game consumed quite a lot of effort from me, I had no idea about the amount of graphic assets that steam requires developers to upload, as well as the amount of information that you need to input in forms about the game, so that slowed down the actual development of the game in a couple of weeks. But I am not complaining, that was good learning and I am glad I went through it!

Announcing the game and setting up the Steam page was my first planned milestone, now that that is done I am looking forward for the next one. Releasing the demo of the game, to gather initial feedback from players as soon as possible!

So for the past couple of weeks I have been working hard into polishing the game, refactoring some parts of it to make my life easier and playtesting a lot to make sure that the initial gameplay is solid enough to start to have people playing it!

Here is a quick comparison of the polishing progress, this is the past gameplay recording:

And the updated one:

The changes are probably subtle, but hopefully noticeable, some highlights worth mentioning are:

• Animated background of stars, giving more life to the game.
• Added some details to the ground so it resembles more of an asteroid surface.
• Improved UIs about storage and contract goals. Related to that is a major refactor that I implemented regarding the goals and construction material, which will enable me to implement different types of campaigns in the future with ease.

Also implemented camera control via UI elements and keyboard shortcuts:

In the next couple of weeks I will continue to work on the missing pieces to be able to have a cool polished demo, this is what I have planned for tasks next:

• Rework bot behaviour: As I was playtesting the game, I noticed that the way the bots work right now, they will not be able to make a production line where a factory connects to another factory, for example a furnace producing copper plates to a workshop making copper wires. So I need to refactor the way they are behaving right now in order to be able to make more complex levels.
• Add tutorials: Right now the player needs to figure it out everything on their own, I will add some quick, hopefully non annoying, explanation in certain levels so the players can grasp the mechanics of the game quicker!
• Music and SFX: Right now there is no sound at all and any game worth playing should have musics and sound effects, so I feel this is a must, even for a demo.

When will the demo be released? Hard to say, the last couple of weeks have been quite busy for me and I don’t believe the following ones will be much different, but I am thriving to have the demo released by mid march! Let’s hope I can make that happen since I can’t wait to start sharing the game with you all!

That is it for now, thanks for reading this and see you next time.

As new year starts, people draw their new year resolution and even though I am not the biggest fan of such thing, I’ve also set at least one resolution: have at least one game published on Steam by the end of the year.

But before I dig into the game that I plan on publishing this year, let take you a little bit in the past, around 3 months ago.

If you follow CherryBit, you might remember that I have been working on this game called Treelings, where you would manage a village on top of tree, attending to your settlers and managing resources.

I started working on that game around November 2023, when I decided to join the 8 Bits to infinity jam of that month (by the way, if you are a game developer be sure to check that community out, they are awesome). The Jam theme was indirect control, with the additional mix of “branches”, and that is why I got that idea of a game which you built a village in a tree, as you didn’t directly controlled your settlers, but rather grew the tree and influence them on doing the work.

The development of that game was going actually well, but as usual, the scope of it was a bit bigger than anticipated, the biggest issue here was that it took a long time for me to get enough of a gameplay, due to many systems that I had to have in place, and well, long story short, I got frustrated and lost the will of working on it.

But as we reached the end of December, I decided to join the Mini Jam that was happening on that week, seeking that as an opportunity to regain my excitement with game development.

That Game Jam theme were connections, and I had this idea of making a resource management game which you have to build railways which would connect resource extractors to resource processors in order gather and craft resources to reach a goal.

In just one day I was able to get the basic mechanics of the game up and running and I feel this productivity was due two main factors:

• Lessons learned from Treelings. I was able to use a lot of the ideas that I had implemented in my previous project which saved me a ton of time.
• Simpler mechanics! This game consists in a simpler mechanic, I finally was able to choose and design mechanic that has a good small scope.

With my excitement regained, I decided to move forward with this new project, which I called Stardustry! I might come back to Treelings some day, but for now, Stardustry will be my main project which will hopefully fulfil my goal of having a released game on steam by the end of the year!

For the past weeks I worked hard on getting the game in a state which I can demo it to people, and I am super close to it. So stay tuned!

In the mean time, I have prepared the game page on Steam! So, if you want to learn more about it, check it here (and be sure to wishlist if the game calls your attention :D)!