GDevelop: An open-source, cross-platform, free, and easy game-making app | Hacker News Reader

GDevelop: An open-source, cross-platform, free, and easy game-making app

gdevelop.io

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I have had great fun making some simple games in GDevelop!

If you know a bit about programming and have an idea for a silly multimedia project, I highly recommend giving it a go.

The visual interface building tool makes it really easy to slap together a GUI or a game map, and the low-code programming interface makes adding simple logic (and sound effects!) pretty quick too.

It did take me a little while to wrap my head around the programming interface, though. There are many things that I like about it, now that I understand it, but I think there’s also some room for improvement.[0]

Working on my little experiments, I felt like I was often relying on some knowledge of other game programming tools to help me guess what functions to look for in GDevelop, and to build an intuition for how the system was working.

So I think GDevelop does a great job of making it easy to code something up quickly. But I don’t think that I would recommend it as a first step into programming, since I think that building up some familiarity with “how programming works” in a more conventional language will make stepping into GDevelop much easier.

If you’re interested interested in making simple games and want something one step more conventional, I highly recommend MakeCode Arcade. It’s a more limited tool than GDevelop—it’s just for simple arcade-style games—but it’s an absolute joy to use.

[0]: I love that GDevelop lets me browse through the API without leaving the app, for example… but somehow I still seem to spend a lot of time looking things up on the wiki. I would love for them to find a way to build even more of that documentation into the application itself!

Replying to myself to add some context:

I teach “media arts” classes at an art school for young people. (Most of my classes are for 6-8 tear olds or 9-12 year olds.)

Some of my colleagues have used GDevelop in their classes, but the projects have been focused on re-skinning the examples that come bundled with GDevelop. That seems to be a big hit with our students!

Once they have done that, though, they naturally want to start modifying the actual gameplay. And while GDevelop makes that easier than it would be in other tools… it’s still too complex for a short class that isn’t explicitly focused on learning programming.

I haven’t tried Makecode Arcade in the classroom yet, but it’s similar to (and simpler than?) Scratch, which other colleagues have had success with.

So that’s the background for my recommendation of Arcade as the place to start, and GDevelop as the next step after you have outgrown Arcade.

Thanks for the context!

My daughter has demonstrated some interest in programming and game development after an introductory overview which was taught in replit using python. She learned about conditionals and loops and modified existing code to make very basic text decision trees.

If I help guide her one on one, do you think gdevelop might be a good place to start next?

Great feedback about the documentation. I believe there is an ongoing effort to make everything accessible through the app, this should get better and better.

License check. [green check]

https://github.com/4ian/GDevelop/blob/master/license.txt

* The Core library, the game engine, the new IDE, and all extensions (respectively Core, GDJS, new IDE and Extensions folders) are under the *MIT license*. * The name, GDevelop, and its logo are the exclusive property of Florian Rival.

See the license.txt in each folders for the full licenses.

Find it weird that the rest is under an organization https://github.com/GDevelopApp, while the main project is under an individual. This means merge and collab works quite differently.

I agree it's a bit weird and mostly because of historical reasons (started on my own account, then never had the courage to move it and fix the various CIs or links to the repo...). But we should do it though, it's long overdue.

I understand the feeling. However, it feels more convincing when this is also maintained in a 'shared' account. Thanks for the reply.

Also, no link from their web site to either GitHub repo?

This can be found on https://gdevelop.io/page/contribute

GDevelop original developer/founder here!

Happy to see it shared :) Happy to answer any questions but as a quick story, I started this on my free time many years ago (before "no-code" was a buzzword). We're seeing great traction since the past year and I think we found something that works really well as a game engine that is actually approachable and fun for a lot of non developers... or even experienced developers! :)

In any case, we would be happy to get some help on GitHub (tons of fun tech challenges for contributors - GDevelop is both a game engine and an IDE and has a compiler for the "no-code" part), we're reworking the whole wiki/documentation (because some part really need some love), and we've built tons of tutorials and examples recently.

And of course, feel free to star the repo! As we're not 100% "developer oriented", a lot of GDevelop users from the community don't even know what GitHub is. So some visibility boost is always appreciated ;)

Here is a link to the main GitHub repo: https://github.com/4ian/GDevelop

Hey y'all. This is GDevelop's UI Designer: I highly encourage you to try the app (we have users starting from 8 y/o to 60 something or more). As 4ian said, we're currently exploring how can we bring the documentation to the app, and any help contributing to the project is highly appreciated: debugging, coding features, translating from EN, writing documentation... even submitting sounds and music (if that's something that you do on the side).

You can find all these on GitHub's Repository.

`brew install gdevelop` gives a SHA256 mismatch error. Yes, there are many possible and valid reasons why a binary might be re-uploaded (thus resulting in a different SHA hash), but still, not a good first impression.

You seem to imply that the brew formula was made by the same developers. But I'm not sure that's the case. Using brew doesn't seem to be the recommended way, the website just gives you a download link.

I can confirm that GDevelop hasn't been added to homebrew yet. It's recommended to either download the app or use the webapp!

Indeed, we (GDevelop core team) never made a brew formula... but maybe we could work to have it maintained officially?

I started using GDevelop in 2020 because it was a no-code, open-source game engine. I have used it to make hundreds of "experiments", a few dozen "games", and even a handful of published projects. :)

If anyone has questions about GDevelop, feel free to ask here (or in the GDevelop Discord).

Anyone have experience with how this compares to a paid alternative such as Scirra's Construct?

In my experience, it is as good or better than Construct 2, and has only improved since I used it in depth. I haven't used Construct 3 to compare.

They do have a lot of overlap in functionality and goals, but there are also a lot of differences. For instance, I build extensions for GDevelop, which are pre-made game logic that are easily usable by anyone. GDevelop has over 100 extensions (and growing) that can save a lot of time and complexity when building a game.

I've used both extensively for many years. All things considered, feature-wise they are about equal.

A massive feature I always mention is Gdevelop has noob friendly export options which are limited to a few a day unless you pay, but you simply export and it works. With Construct you need outside SDK and the skills to use them, such as Cordova or Android Studio for example. Gdevelop has this too and you can do unlimited exports for free. However, as far as I know Construct seems to have better console support like for Xbox. Nintendo Switch doesn't allow HTML5 games so it supports neither natively.

Comparing them is pretty nitpicky and depends on what you value. There are a just a few things Construct does better and I could elaborate if you'd like. To keep things brief: It handles variables in a better way, the expressions are slightly more noob friendly, the effects library is better, and the event sheet is more responsive, and better multiplayer. Gdevelop generally does everything else not listed equally or better. Gdevelop also has built in documentation and asset store. Gdevelop has rapidly deployed fixes to all other critiques I had of the engine. Even if I wanted massive features, the team implemented them as if they were reading my mind. Gdevelop relies on community support and it has it with it's open-source nature.

This may seem more overly critical of Gdevelop than I intended. Right now and for the future I wouldn't use any other "code free" engine. Like many others I've mostly moved on from Construct onto Gdevelop. But I don't have loyalty to any engine so I'm going to be honest when comparing them. About equal I'd say.

About GDevelop's multiplayer being worse than construct, have you checked out my multiplayer extension for GDevelop, "THNK"[1]?

From what I can see on the Construct3 documentation[2], they seem to be roughly matched in terms of features:

Both are authoritative with a host-client architecture, both allow using WebRTC DataChannels for UDP connections, sending messages, synchronizing objects & instance variables automatically, and using a relay with rooms.

THNK has some features that Construct's multiplayer also does not seem to have. For example:

- THNK is fully network agnostic[3] through a network adapter system (you can easily implement an adapter for another networking method in a few lines). Using the geckos.io adapter, you can connect to a player on the LAN via an IP address, even if offline, instead of requiring the presence of the signaling server for a connection to happen.

- Games made with THNK work in single-player normally by default. It only becomes multiplayer once you connect to/start a server via an adapter.

But Construct also seems to have features THNK doesn't (yet) have. For example:

- Listing rooms (when using the THNK Rooms adapter)

- Expressions for stats

- Local input prediction

Hence, I think of them as roughly evenly matched.

Disclaimer: My claims here are based from the information I read on [1]. I have not used Construct multiplayer before and might very well be wrong with this comparison. I would be happy to be proven wrong.

[1]: THNK Documentation - https://thnk.cloud/ [2]: Construct Multiplayer Documentation - https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/manuals/construct-3/... [3] THNK Adapters Documentation - https://thnk.cloud/docs/misc/picking-an-adapter/

Nice to see this app here. I wonder why they are not more known. Their application is well made, I followed some tutorials, it's pretty easy-to-use. I think it's open source (and therefore free).

> it's open source (and therefore free).

Nitpick, but this isn't always true.

This is so cool! GDevelop is an amazing tool for people who want to dive right in to making games, it's so cool that it's featured here!

Can anyone who's played with this let me know if its something a 7-year old who has ideas about game making could try out?

Definitely! It's being used in classrooms in Denmark with children as young as 7 years old: https://gdevelop.io/blog/gdevelop-teacher-testimonial-maria-...

at first I thought it was an alternative to kdevelop from gnome, kekw

Wow, this is pretty awesome! Thank you for featuring GDevelop!

This is really cool! Started working on my first game :)

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