Making game creation fast and accessible to all

👋 Hi, I'm Florian

Some things I've done:

Software engineer in the Android Games team at Google
- Android Game Development Kit, support for texture compression format + various gaming related work
"Full stack" software engineer at Meta
Built a game for Lil BUB (iOS, Android, desktop)
Started GDevelop, the open-source project
And founded the company of the same name

GDevelop?

An open-source, no-code, lightweight and fast game engine

Make game creation radically more fast, simple, accessible.

GDevelop

github.com/4ian/GDevelop

Designed to be 10x more approachable than anything else,
2D and 3D games,
Large range of games: casual, midcore, education, promotional games...
Publish to App Stores (Android, iOS), Windows, macOS, Linux, web (HTML5). Consoles one day!

2D/3D scene editor

Natural language, "event" based logic

Behaviors

3rd party editors

Asset Store

Reminds me of...

Demo!

But why?

Be the first step for all new game creator. Young or old.
- That's why it's no-code
- That's why it's lightweight & runs anywhere

Be there for all ambitious games
- That's why it's open-source
- That's why no-code is not a gimmick
- That's why it's based on other proven, open-source libraries

But how?

TypeScript + WebAssembly + WebGL game engine
- PixiJS and Three.js for WebGL/WebGPU rendering
- Physics library (Box2D)
- ...

(Typed) JavaScript + WebAssembly + React editor

Ready to use cloud build, leaderboards, player accounts backend services.
Bring your own or use our own.

But it's limited

Not really - not at all:

The "no-code" approach is turing complete. Transpiled to code.
Object + Behaviors is an "Entity Component" architecture
Build new Objects, Behaviors, Actions, Conditions directly from the editor
Use JavaScript at any time...
...but you probably won't use it a lot.

But it's for beginners

We're happy to have beginners!
It's even perfect for education
But the truth is that we're building a higher abstraction level - one that is approachable and that developers also want to use.

Tweens
Physics engine
Visual effects (Shaders)
Behaviors ("components")
Structures/arrays
Custom objects ("prefabs" but encapsulated)
Tilemaps
Particles
Lights
Bitmap texts
Shape painters
Debugger
Profiler
Hot reloading
...

GDevelop has features from all game engines...

Buttons
Health system
Smooth camera
Bullets handling
Pixel perfect movement
Transitions
Checkpoints
Linear movement
Pinching gesture handling
Explosions
Orbit movement
Boomerang

...but goes one level beyond in the abstraction levels

But it's slow

JavaScript is JIT compiled
WebAssembly used and to be used much more
Events transpiled to JavaScript
We could switch to another rendering engine.

We're not building the best rendering/physics/game engine in the world (other OSS projects are doing this very well!), but building on the shoulders of these giants

But no way to make successful games

Usage for edu?

Runs from any browser, super lightweight
Teach logic, game creation or coding
Get fun, visual results quickly
Fun results that can be shared!
Tons of tutorials on gdevelop.io/academy and 2 long format videos on FreeCodeCamp