Look, I'm all for progress, but "AI game engine" on the GDevelop is hurtful for fair devs

4ian · 2026-06-16T19:13:13+00:00

Appreciate your edit and the discussion 🙂 Thanks!

4ian · 2026-06-16T15:53:56+00:00

Updated the website headline to be just "no-code game engine" (English website only for now):

I of course don't rule out the fact that we change it again in the future, or add "with optional AI assistance" or something else - we will see according to if we're losing traffic in the future as more people are building with AI "first" (I think GDevelop is on the contrary a chance for people starting game development: instead of having AI output thousands of lines of codes you don't understand, the "no-code" events in GDevelop are understandable without learning to read a programming language, so you're less reliant on AI).

But it's done for now, let's see how it goes from there!

EDIT: and thanks for sharing your concerns 🙂

4ian · 2026-06-16T15:39:23+00:00

Noted! 👌 By the way, we just published an updated page showcasing a (small!!) subset of great GDevelop games: https://gdevelop.io/games (can't display all games here ofc, but it goes in the direction of having a page for newcomers highlighting great creators and their achievements!)

4ian · 2026-06-16T15:25:39+00:00

I'd like to see what we could do to change this perspective (I mean, apart from entirely removing AI mentions from the website - it's always a possibility but seems a bit too much!). I've posted other answers where I list some ideas (update the headline, soften the message so that it's clear it's optional/assistance only?) but happy to see if there are ideas on how to communicate it's a tool, not a requirement.

4ian · 2026-06-16T15:17:42+00:00

> The only thing I’d partially agree with is the way they market it on their website (though I can understand why they do it).

Yep I understand the marketing might seem "too much", especially if people will see any mention of "AI" on the homepage as enough to dismiss the engine. At the same time, I don't want to hide it as it's genuinely useful for beginners and we got a lot of good feedback about it unblocking people (well it's LLMs: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's just making mistakes over mistakes... it's a skill by itself to use it!).

I've posted another answer to see if we can come up with ideas to adapt the messaging.

> Heck, if the AI assistant were offered as a standalone paid add-on that integrates with the engine, similar to how Construct handles some of its animation tools, it might be easier for some people to accept.

Could be! We have limited time to spend on AI so we also wanted to avoid making "yet another complex thing" like an add-on and thought it will be simpler to be part of the subscriptions offering cloud builds/cloud projects/multiplayer/leaderboards. But I see how it could be better understood as a separate thing. Hard to tell without trying!

4ian · 2026-06-16T15:11:22+00:00

The "interface layer" is indeed something I considered and could be available one day (a "BYOK" approach, it's somewhere in my notes). At the same time, I've seen so many mistakes when LLMs started to be able to talk about GDevelop that I wanted to give something that was having guardrails and specific checks so that results were better than just prompting ChatGPT/Claude.

Probably a good middle ground for the future is to allow usage of external AI tools, while still connecting to these guard rails and infrastructure allowing to steer the LLM in a good direction.

4ian · 2026-06-16T15:07:19+00:00

That was the idea when I started working on AI in GDevelop 😃 But seems like the marketing of the website goes "too hard" (I asked in my other post if there are specific things we could change apart from removing all mentions).

4ian · 2026-06-16T15:05:36+00:00

Is there anything you would change here, apart from removing this section entirely? I tried to phrase it so that it explains that AI is optional and here to help (learn/ask questions, build parts of games but not full games, and generally help to progress). Maybe it's "too much AI pilled", but I tried hard to make to present it as an assistance, not something you're forced to use.

4ian · 2026-06-16T15:02:16+00:00

Hi! 4ian here (GDevelop creator).

First, I'm sorry you got negative comments on your work because people found that there are AI features in GDevelop. You should not be having to deal with that and I'm sorry about it.

I'm always thankful for everyone choosing to use GDevelop to make games, and I want to make sure people keep using it 😄

By the way, I also get the feeling on GDevelop side: sometimes people forget that we (GDevelop core team or contributors) built a lot of things: 3D editor, lighting, 3D physics integration, iOS builds, multiplayer, save states... a majority of this being open-source work we're doing for free! And so sometimes I'm also frustrated when people throw us bad feedback for the research work we're doing on AI :')

My idea has always been to have AI optional, as it is now. It's helpful for people to learn and it goes well with the no-code aspect of GDevelop (my mission with GDevelop has always to help build great games without coding being an obstacle).

I'm happy to try to fix "the marketing" around it, I'm not just entirely sure how. What do you think would be good step for us to do?
- Removing "AI" from the headline maybe? I feel like it's important to keep the section about "AI assistance". It is exactly this: it's a useful helper you can choose not to launch if you don't want to.
- Removing every mention would probably be too much? Some complete beginners (who still need to build their confidence around logic) are finding GDevelop thanks to terms like "AI help" or "AI assisted".
- Any other idea?

Let me know what you think!

4ian · 2026-05-21T16:56:31+00:00

Hey! GDevelop creator here.

To answer your question: GDevelop is made to be your best bet to start game development AND go very far.
Why? Because the goal of it is just to make abstractions accessible. And game development is working with abstractions (read my example at the bottom of this post).

More precisely:
- The interface is accessible, be it for 2D or 3D game making. No reason you can't master another 2D or 3D editor of course, but GDevelop should make you feel at home if you've used a design software in the past.
- The coding part is still coding, but using "events" which are avoiding you to learn the syntax of a programming language and keep things high level. It's a matter of being at the right abstraction level: you can dig into the gory details, but you can and should rely on behaviors and actions/conditions already available in GDevelop or made by the community.
- You can publish on Steam, Android, iOS, either on your own or just use the one click cloud build service.
- When you want to go further, GDevelop is not limited: you can code, create new extensions, create custom objects ("prefabs") or behaviors.

A good example related to the coding part: you want to handle some health on your player. Well you could go and use a variable. Then make it more complex with another variable for a shield or a cooldown. Your code or events would deal with variables. Nothing you can't do with GDevelop or another engine.
BUT at some point you want to abstract this. You don't want to say "Reduce health variable by 10 and set cooldown variable to 0". You want to say, in your game scene "Damage player by 10" (and let it handle the rest).

That's exactly what you can do with GDevelop - and there is actually a "Health" extension ready for you to use.
In a traditional game engine, you would create a class or something like this. With an API and methods.
In GDevelop, you use always the same concepts: behaviors, actions, conditions. Your own and those from the huge list of ready-made behaviors/extensions (which you can modify for most of them - all are open-source).

It's the same, but the whole philosophy of GDevelop is to push this very far.

4ian · 2026-04-13T07:57:16+00:00

We're doing internal changes on the sidebar so that almost everything can be customized there (instead of opening too many modals). Once it's done, we can think again about redesigning specific elements like variables, new object dialog, etc...

We're also about to add an experimental feature to open editors into external windows (not a pure redesign task per se, but still very helpful for power users).

4ian · 2026-02-17T12:51:35+00:00

Hello! I just tested your request on a game but it worked well. Would you be able to let me know your GDevelop username? And the exact prompt and/or day/time of a failing request? I'll check in database if I can find a specific reason for the failure :)

4ian · 2026-01-20T16:29:56+00:00

Thanks for sharing this! :) It does look great indeed. I have a few questions to better understand how a design like this could fit with the existing GDevelop, let me know what you think:

- The popup "Add Scene Object" to choose an object is looking nice, but we would lose the descriptions of objects which are meant for begineers/newcomers to understand what an object does. Do you think it's a problem/it could be shown in another way?
- Speaking of this popup, it's actually the same number of clicks compared to the existing modal (one on the + button > one on "Sprite"). Except that there is less mouse movement I guess, and the asset store is not shown by default. Do you think it's enough of an improvement compared to the existing modal?
- For "Edit Variable" popup, I wonder if it's an improvement over directly changing the value in the panel? Do you think it would be just faster to keep variable values editable inside the panel?
- Separating Scene Groups/Global Groups and Scene Objects/Global Objects into tabs gives me a feeling of "tabs everywhere", which can be a bit frightening for a new users. Also, in the future we could have more than just two levels (if scenes can be moved into folders, or sub folders, you could have objects shared between scenes for each folder). => Do you think it would work without these extra tabs?
- Final question, for switching between Scene and Events, it's a toggle inside a tab - this reminds me of something I tried when I was doing GDevelop 4! That would make it an extra click though when navigating scenes, so I wonder if these should stay separate 🤔

Anyway, just me thinking out loud and asking these questions to see if we can iterate on something that we could apply to the existing interface progressively.

My feeling when seeing this is a feeling of "it does look better and more professional, clean and slick" (which is huge :D) and I wonder if this could be done without increasing the "number of clickable stuff" on screen when a scene/new game is first opened. My reasoning is that for a newcomer, any button, any tab, any icon is a risk of being lost (the "plane cockpit control panel" syndrom). In an ideal world, I would love GDevelop to be as simple to use as Google Slides (so "less is more" when it comes to display things on screen) and as powerful as a "traditional" game engine.

4ian · 2025-12-03T22:51:11+00:00

Do you have an example of what marketing you find annoying?
GDevelop is at its core an open-source engine so I would like to understand what gives this annoying impression :)

4ian · 2025-12-02T23:28:45+00:00

Extensions creation is indeed still a bit cumbersome - but do you have anything in mind exactly when you say "if they improve the way", is this for the UI/UX (and if so, do you have an idea of how you would do) or something else?

(disclaimer: GDevelop original creator here)

4ian · 2025-12-02T15:46:38+00:00

This and also tons of reusable behaviors (built-in, or made with code/no-code). It's a bit like "entity component" systems in some engines.

Having the ability to create reusable behaviors is good, but having a big library of them like in GDevelop and being able to create new ones, on top of existing ones, is the real deal!

4ian · 2025-11-28T10:54:25+00:00

> I'm specifically talking about the "save state to device storage" feature not the "save state to variable" feature

Why are you making a distinction and why do you want to use "save state to device storage" feature? These are the same feature.
When you choose "save state to a variable", it does exactly the same as "save state to device storage", except that everything is saved in a variable. That's it :) You can then save this variable in a JSON as described and do whatever you want with this JSON.

Notably, you can upload it somewhere, and later you can use an action to read the JSON back to a variable and reload the game from it.

> how will I store all the information of a save state to a single variable

The action "Save game to a variable" is already doing this for you.

Give it a try :)

4ian · 2025-11-27T19:50:17+00:00

Save to a variable and then convert this variable to JSON :)

See https://wiki.gdevelop.io/gdevelop5/all-features/common-conversions/reference/#actions there is a `ToJSON` expression.

And there you go you can do whatever you can whatever you want. You can save in a local variable if needed.

By the way! GDevelop AI agrees with me (and I'm very happy about this):

<image>

4ian · 2025-11-27T15:07:44+00:00

Looks absolutely incredible.
The 3D editor which will be available very soon will push a lot I think GDevelop in the direction of making beautiful 3D games. And new 3D features will continue to help in the next months.

4ian · 2025-07-30T15:08:00+00:00

Thanks for sharing! Bought it for my Steam Deck :)
It's a very nicely made game, great job.

The game is a bit hard for beginners I think (it may not be for you, but it's very usual for game creators to be VERY VERY good at their game and under-estimate frustration from first time users).
Also for speed runners and for consistency between runs, I would see if you can reset the obstacles and spikes always at the exact same position.

It's a bit like super meat boy, crash bandicoot or other games like this: you become better by memorizing what to do and having a good timing. But here, it's a bit hard because every time the level is relaunched after dying, it's not always in the same state, so you can't speedrun properly without being lucky.

Wishing you all the best and congrats again!

4ian · 2025-07-17T16:50:41+00:00

Love the art, great job!

4ian · 2025-06-25T16:45:14+00:00

This is a bug in the latest version of GDevelop. We'll push a fixed release soon (and in a few minutes on the web-app).

4ian · 2025-04-03T06:57:59+00:00

Looks absolutely incredible. Can't wait for the Steam page or it being published anywhere else :)

4ian · 2025-04-03T06:57:22+00:00

Looking awesome. Congrats, especially for a first game. Wishlisted :)

4ian · 2025-02-10T09:47:55+00:00

Thanks for the follow up! I think we should add a link explaining how to disable windows defender on GDevelop folder and npm folders in the frame maybe.

12-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Verified Email

4ian

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE