Plinth! My first arcade-style game.

Plinth is a brand new arcade-style game for Android that has just been released. The objective of the game is to stand on a column, and then tap to stop the next column from appearing, ideally at the same height as the player. If the player stops the column too high, the extra part gets trimmed off, making subsequent columns shorter. If it's stopped too low, the player falls. Plinth is built using Flutter and Flame frameworks.

The game employs a 2D canvas drawing instead of 3D, using filled polygons for each column in isometric projection. To achieve the illusion of depth, the boxes are sorted by their grid coordinates and painted from back to front. The player character is drawn last, except when falling into a gap, where it slots into the sorting order to ensure correct coverage by the columns in front.

The game's feel is created through small details, such as the character crouching before a jump, stretching in the air, and squashing upon landing. A rising chime plays as a perfect stop, and the sound effects are generated using a Python + numpy script. When a player beats their previous best score, they receive a "NEW BEST!" notification with confetti.

Coins and unlocks are synced across devices without a backend, using Google Play Games Saved Games to store per-device running totals of earned and spent coins. Owned items merge as a union. Claude Code was used to find a quick fix for an R8 code shrinking issue in release builds, which led to discovering a second problem related to Google's interactive Play Games sign-in.

The game includes AdMob rewarded ads, with no banners or interstitials, to avoid interrupting the gameplay. The consent form for EU and UK users is mandatory, requiring the UMP SDK to request consent before initializing ads. Plinth is available for free on Google Play, and the author encourages players to provide feedback and reach out for any questions about building similar games in Flutter and Flame.