GDevelop is a game engine that makes it possible for aspiring developers to develop a game without the knowledge of any coding or experience in the field. The interest in such tools to develop a game without coding experience, especially this year, might be increasing but GDevelop is already around for a while.
When Florian Rival first started working on GDevelop it was an open-source side project. The launch of the first public version of GDevelop was published on GitHub, back in 2014. His vision was to enable ambitious people to develop the game they dream about.
If you are willing to give it a try, you can launch GDevelop from the browser or the application. There are templates that you can try and edit.
For the sake of ease of use and accessibility to more developers with less experience, GDevelop is focused on 2D games.
For game design, all mechanisms that can be included in your game is in the Events tab. The actions that are listed are described – if the player is crouching then you should animate the character with the “crouching” animation.
A lot of actions can be executed with GDevelop from its pre-set of actions. If you are looking to do something more complex, the integrated extension system lets you add further logic to the game. It’s also possible to create your own extension if you are willing to take the extra step. This custom extension can be a set of conditions and actions or Javascript code.
To render the game, GDevelop takes the advantage of web technologies, namely WebGL, Javascript, and WebAssembly. When your game is ready to be exported, you can export it for web browsers or for Android devices. Approximately, half of GDevelop users choose the latter option.
Throughout the years, GDevelop has managed to gather some remarkable metrics. Another plus is that hundreds of games are showcased on GDevelop’s website. Some of the games that were created in the GDevelop have gone mainstream. With more than a million downloads, Vai Juliette, a game created in GDevelop reached the first two spots in the top free download charts on the Play Store and App Store in Brazil.
The motivation to use GDevelop is plentiful. Some developers use it and invest more of their time on complex projects to later release them on Steam or Itch.io. Some brands use the engine to support the launch of a new product of theirs via the promotional games they make in it.
“My dream is that the next Among Us will be developed using GDevelop,” Florian Rival says.
Hopeful for the future, Florian Rival is creating a company around the GDevelop, which is not a side gig anymore. This start-up that’s led by Seedcamp, with Secretfund, Kima Ventures, Ascension, Jabre Capital Partners, The Fund, and Foreword.vc has raised $1.4 million funding up till now. Michael Pennington, Emmanuel Nataf, Will Neale, Ian Hogarth, and Ross Sheil are among the investing business angels.
The six-person team is iterating on the open-source game engine to improve it. GDevelop does not intend to release a commercial engine in terms of monetization. Instead, the company is considering services that could be beneficial to GDevelop users. GDevelop, for example, could provide a one-click export solution for releasing and monetizing a game. Because of the MIT license, game developers retain complete ownership of the games they create with GDevelop.
For many mobile game developers, ads are the sole source of income. Yet, integrating ads in a game can be complicated. GDevelop’s ad feature comes in handy for the implementation of ads to the game.
It’s safe to say that as long as GDevelop remains popular, there will be ways to create revenue streams and help out future developers.
