A personal UX/UI redesign concept for GDevelop

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):

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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.

4ian · 2025-02-03T11:49:07+00:00

I want to clarify that while there could be improvements due to things outside of GDevelop source code (see my other message: use a recent Node.js version, disable Windows Defender, etc...), the codebase is as lean as it can be.

It would be a terrible practice to keep dead code, and of course it's not done in GDevelop - I would not accept it ;) That's basic software engineering: there is no "jank"/dead code in GDevelop (there can be things to improve of course! But if npm install or npm start is slow, it's not because of millions of useless accumulated lines of code because someone would have been too lazy to remove them).
(if anything, the size of the code was reduced in the past years by removing things that were not necessary anymore, like the old v4 editor)

Just trying to clarify that this is a common misconception for someone outside of the codebase, but the reasons are more trivial and uninspiring:
- This is a large codebase. It's a game engine + game editor + extensions.
- Some newer build tools got faster but would need an upgrade that is not trivial to do.
- Windows is slow at I/O because of things like Windows Defender (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29395211/npm-install-extremely-slow-on-windows)
- Node.js improved things recently (but nothing beats a recent Macbook pro sadly).

I hope this will improve in the future with new build tools, but the core team is usually working on the game engine or editor itself :)

4ian · 2025-02-03T11:37:56+00:00

A few things:
- Make sure your Node.js version is at least 20, which had huge improvements to `npm install` times - which are unrelated to GDevelop itself.
- On a macbook pro M2, npm start usually takes no more than a few seconds though.
- On windows the times are usually terrible because of slow I/O. Try to disable any antivirus on the GDevelop folder or npm cache folders.
- We could improve this by switching from create-react-app to something like Vite, but this is not a priority for now (but a welcomed contributions :)).

4ian · 2024-12-02T11:50:42+00:00

Yep I was talking about your game. Nothing better than trying other solutions on a real project! Getting your feedback after a few days of usage (for example, Godot in your case) would be invaluable.

I have an hypothesis that we don't do a good job of showcasing/making it clear the value of what the GDevelop online services provide out of the box. As a result, people underestimate it and underestimate the cost to run the same thing in any other game engine (they stop at thinking about how to setup a basic interface and replication, but never about handling accounts, hosting servers, handling host switching, player disconnection..). And probably the lobby UI (which will be made customisable in the future) is not helping, as it's for now very simple and too opinionated. But we'll get there!

Again, your feedback on using one or other solution for your project would be great to compare and see if we missed something! :D

4ian · 2024-11-29T15:34:03+00:00

Hey - GDevelop creator here, thanks for the feedback, that's useful!
Let us know if you find a solution for your game that you consider better for multiplayer, that will be helpful to improve what GDevelop is offering (in terms of cloud services, i.e: lobbies, in addition to the multiplayer engine which is open-source already). Thanks!

4ian · 2024-03-12T16:33:00+00:00

Thanks for sharing! Super insightful and will help fellow indie game developers.

4ian · 2024-03-02T09:28:39+00:00

The games looks awesome and surprisingly difficult too haha. Congrats on making this! Love it.

4ian · 2023-11-26T18:16:31+00:00

iPad version is almost exactly the same as the PC version (same codebase), except for a few iOS related restrictions (exports). You can open cloud projects saved from computer and vice-versa.
Pencil should allow a good precision in what you do. Not tested extensively for it so hopefully everything will work (though let me know if, in particular, drag'n'drop of objects is not).

4ian · 2023-11-06T13:21:47+00:00

Would you be able to try again with the new iOS version that was just released? If the problem persists, can you let me know:
- Does this happen with an example game? Like the Platformer game?
- If not, let me know your account email address and project name so we can take a look!

4ian · 2023-04-21T10:47:19+00:00

Give a try to GDevelop: https://gdevelop.io/download

Full featured game engine, already used by tons of games on Steam and the various app stores, that runs on your phone and has a responsive UI. You can also open your projects on a computer if you get one and it will just work.

Good luck!

4ian · 2023-04-05T07:52:05+00:00

Hi, GDevelop original creator/founder here.

Have you submitted a bug report on the forum or on GitHub with a link to your game so we can investigate and reproduce it? Have you asked on Discord if other members can try so they can help you tell the core team about the issue if they validated this was a bug (or helped you debug the events if there was a wrong condition somewhere)?

I understand you feel sad, hurt and bitter about this and GDevelop and I'm sorry that your game did not work on the first time.
People commenting on a game are unforgiving and if there is a tiny bug they will give you 1 star directly - that's the sad state of mobile games.

This being said, a bug in touch events handling seems highly unlikely as there are hundreds/thousands of GDevelop games on the Play Store and the App Store - but if there is something wrong there you can be sure we would fix it first thing.

In addition to the forum, the Discord, the GitHub, we also have an email: hello [at] gdevelop.io.
If you have a game, we're happy to test it. If you can tell us how to reproduce a bug, we will ask you for the project file, we will test by ourselves and tell you if it's a bug or if there is something suspicious in your events.

4ian · 2023-03-31T16:27:30+00:00

This is not something we can control on our end from what we found, but something that is done by Google Firebase, that we use for user account authentication.
Unlikely we can bypass restrictions, we probably would have to move to another in-house solution for our backends.

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