Gdevelop is now fully open source!!

Florian Rival open sourced it today:

GD is one of the most powerful and comprehensive software to create games without programming, and is now open to contributions from any developer.
For developers, source code is available on https://github.com/4ian/gd

What is gamedevelop?

Game Develop is a free game creation software, allowing to make games for the web ( HTML5 ) or for Windows and Linux. No programming or coding skill is required! It is easy to use and powerful enough for advanced users.

website:

It is also worth noting that Gamedevelop is the only visual programming game development environment that:

  • is multiplatform (windows and linux, mac to come)
  • is open source and can export to html5 - meaning it can compile for a wide range of operating systems and devices. You can actually make money with it.

Being open source now gives full freedom to developers to fix issues they find in it or extend it. :eyebrowlift2:

How is gamedevelop different from Godot?

  • it doesnt require you to know any programming language/syntax. So anyone can make a game

How is it different from blender?

  • it exports to html5, but it is only 2d atm - with some basic 3d effects for native game builds

How about Unity?

  • Completely free of charge, open source- so you own it. The community owns it now!

Cheers!

Reading through it, does it have any functionality that allows for sprite editing within the program or do you have to do all of that in an external app.?

Also, is it possible to say, have the game be both an HTML 5 project and a native project? A lot of modern game engines allow you to quickly publish to multiple formats in a few clicks.

On top of that, the wiki seems to suggest they have made their own custom license for its usage, have they taken into account the idea that people with big ideas might rather branch it into a new commercial project instead of contributing to the original?

Reading through it, does it have any functionality that allows for sprite editing within the program or do you have to do all of that in an external app.?

You can edit the frame order and speed of animation of animated sequences. You can also assign action points that are also animateable to each frame of a sequence. Those are useful for gameplay mechanics.

When it comes to pixel editing - you will need to use an external app to make your sprites and animation sequences.
But hey, now being open source- somebody might get inspired and write a simple bitmap editor for it. :slight_smile:

Also, is it possible to say, have the game be both an HTML 5 project and a native project? A lot of modern game engines allow you to quickly publish to multiple formats in a few clicks.

Gamedevelop can currently compile games for html5 and also for the native platform that it is running on (windows or linux). Some of the native functionality (automatisms) is not yet available for html5 games.

If you compile for html5, you will be able to test your game and run it straight in your web browser. If you would like to package it, there are a number of options to do that- intel’s xdk, cacoonjs and so on

Well it does seem clear that they have a little ways to go before they become a truly full-fledged suite (GameMaker has been able to create animations of sprites drawn in its pixel editor since it was that little free 2D software more than 12 years ago). Though I give them the benefit that it seems to be a somewhat new software so that may easily change.

I also spotted a potential showstopper in their list of math expressions, and that is that they currently don’t seem to have much means to facilitate endless gameplay and procedural generational mechanics due to their lack of a basic random function (I tend to be a sucker for endless gameplay which I see personally as a core reason why I might want to pick up one of these free 2D engines).

It has Random function.
http://i.imgur.com/oKSPRxh.png

Though you may need to activate some extension to access it, but it does have one. Although the thing it lacks are things like perlin noise and ability to set constant, custom seed.

+100 !
Very cool, now the possibility are unlimited, yay !!
If anyone like a genius can make 3D gamedevelop is just a dream, hope that will be :stuck_out_tongue:

There’s 3D gamedevelop already, it’s called Unity. But I agree that open-source software like that would be super thing. Or even Unity-like editor for thing like Ogre or Irrlicht.

Anyway, 3D is out of scope for GD for the time being. It is made to be free (and now open-source) alternative to tools like Multimedia Fusion or Construct and is very good at that, especially since it’s faster as events are compiled to native code instead of being interpreted like in other tools. I’ll probably get into coding it (been GD user and evangelist for year or two), I have few ideas that I think are cool to do, probably will make HTML5 preloader designer first so people playing games won’t be scared by this black screen with percentage.

It is a very nice tool actually.

A must for non-programmers who want to develop games. A little bit understanding how coding works is needed though.Things like variables,strings. It also has save and load capability for global - scene and object variables.It can create files on the project folder very easily no need to do anything complicated.

One thing left to check out , the gui elements and interfaces like inventory. I didnt check those out.There is not enough tutorial content out there. Some of the tutorials are in French. But the help file also supports English.

one of it’s biggest weaknesses at the moment is the lack of demo files and tutorials created by the community. We have only one or two people on the entire internet who are making tutorial videos once in a while.

If you are not a developer, and you would like to help gamedevelop evolve- a good way to do it is to help with tutorials and documentation. Also feedback on the forum.

Florian is a very friendly guy and usually picks on comments and takes notice. If you make a tutorial or a game with it and release it, he will most probably feature it and help promote it!

Well, there are examples bundled with the program. It’s not same as ton of sample games made by MMF crowd, but enough to get you started. For pete’s sake, there’s even simple Wolf3D-like engine example!

Anyway, bigger weakness is lack of extensions aside those bundled with software and few 3rd party one. Certainly not on MMF scale that special downloading program (like Linux repo) was needed so people can know about most of them.

it’s similar like Construct 2 game engine with free version, but the Gamedevelop is open source.

  1. Thank you, Cpt. Obvious
  2. Game Develop is better than any existing tool as “events” are compiled to native code (one of reasons you can’t really export Linux game from Windows and vice versa) instead of being interpreted and because of that engine is lighting fast.

I’ve been playing around with it for the past few days. VERY easy to learn, and more importantly, VERY fast compared to other visual programming interfaces I’ve seen at runtime.

Yup, it’s super fast, because events are compiled to c++ code, then compiled to native executable. I actually prefer GD over other engines. Not only because it is totally free, no strings attached, but also it is very easy to use and you can get game going very quickly.

I’m the boat! I (re)discovered GD a few weeks ago, and this time I juggled a little with it. I must say is really easy to learn and get started. I asked for some help on the forum and got response very quickly, despite it’s still a little community. Florian himself gave me directions too. I think it’s a really worthy software to take a look at.
Regarding a pixel editor I don’t think it should be a priority. There’s ton of them to use freely, why put efforts to integrate one now?
Ah, and don’t just think of games! Just let imagination run to fullscreen webapps with external database (json) support. Juicy.

btw Darkhog and blurymind, do you have news about the webapp version?

No, sorry. I (and believe blurrymind as well) know as much as you do about webapp. I think for pixel editor, Florian could contact dev of GraphicsGale to bundle free version of it with GD.

GraphicsGale is a windows only app afaik

Still, it’s best pixel editor on the market. And it runs well on Wine.

there are a few open source pixel editors that support animation out there. Sadly they are ancient.

I personally use built in pixel editors in MMF/construct2 when testing out something with the design. I use that stuff as placeholder until I have something better.

Something better meaning - done with inkscape, blender or krita. Usually for animation I tend to use toonboom studio in combination with pencil2d

Aseprite is a pretty good Open Source pixel editor that runs on Win/Mac/Linux. I think the latest official Win/Mac binaries cost $10, but you can always just built it from source. It does animation, tiles, spritesheets, etc.