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Creating awesome 2D games can be made quite easy, thanks to tools like GDevelop, the free and open source game engine that has an events-driven system so even beginners can use it.

Instead of writing out tons of lines of code (well, you can still do that), you drag and drop events around and add actions to things. It's clever and it does work quite well. They're quickly improving the game engine and editor for GDevelop too with a new release up.

GDevelop "5.0.0-beta89" brings in a handy new right click menu for the events editor, allowing you to easily choose the object and the action or condition to add:

Plenty more came with the release including a new "Flappy Bird" example project and the "Breakout" example project was also improved. The BBText object added in a recent release, which enables you to very easily add in stylised text gained a font selector, there's a new option to search in event texts, export/preview generation speed was improved by around 20% and more helpful descriptions/buttons were added to the interface as well.

Quite a number of bug fixes made it in too including an improvement to pixel perfect rendering of games, which can help with the issue of "bleeding" tiles. The Dialogue Tree (Yarn) extension that's integrated also had multiple problems solved, allowing even smoother dialogue systems to be made in GDevelop.

I think game engines like this are brilliant and it continues to amaze me how easy it has become to get started with game development. A good stepping stone towards something bigger perhaps? Something to quickly make a prototype or even a full game—GDevelop is definitely worth looking at.

Interested? You can find the official site here, with the code up on GitHub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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5 comments

elmapul Mar 6, 2020
honestly, this thing is worse than clickteam fusion was 20 years ago, back when it was called multimedia fusion.
not to mention construct 3...

i know, i know, its open source, and support linux, but its not usable yet.
well, its getting there, but trying to make any serious game on it, right now, would be an waste of time.

begginers cant contribute then selves to it and the ones who understand more about code are... i dont know, contributing to godot instead?

at this rate, i dont see much of a future for this project and dont see many sucess cases being made on it on the future.

i really wish it luck, i loved the workflow of mmf/construct, but everytime i download it to see the new version, it still has some glaring issues.
at least it looks stable this time, but the UI is too big and clunky, i coundt use it for 5 minutes without losing my patience.

for some one who never used anything better, it should not be an big issue, but for me its like torture, i dont know if its an good idea to recomend it just yet...

not to mention, its designed to be navitad with an keyboard, that is the opposite of what i expect from an newbie friendly engine, for 2 reasons:

1)an newbie cant know the list of options that he can perform, so in order to figure out how to delete an object he will have to guess the correct term: destroy? delete?
its even worse if english is not you arent an english native speaker.
and it make it harder to translate.

2)moving from the keyboard to type and mouse too much will be tiring


Last edited by elmapul on 6 March 2020 at 12:04 am UTC
Liam Dawe Mar 6, 2020
Quoting: elmapulhonestly, this thing is worse than clickteam fusion was 20 years ago, back when it was called multimedia fusion.
not to mention construct 3...
You're talking about entirely professionally made software, from teams that have been building such game engines and editors for a very long time. It's incredibly unfair to compare them together in such a way and it's WAY more powerful than Clickteam stuff from 20 years ago (hello, I used it all TGF/MMF everything) that's a big overstatement.

Speaking from my own experience, GDevelop is a vast improvement to what it was a year or so ago. They are doing good work and this last year has seen quick progression on it.

Quoting: elmapulwell, its getting there, but trying to make any serious game on it, right now, would be an waste of time.
Well, Hyperspace Dogfights was made with it and that game is seriously cool.

Sounds like you could be giving this feedback to them. Have you opened any tickets with them on GitHub or anywhere else? If they don't know about issues stopping people, they can't look to solve them.
appetrosyan Mar 6, 2020
Doesn't matter if it's good now. As long as it keeps getting better.
Wendigo Mar 7, 2020
Since GDevelop takes part in this years Google Summer of Code the development speed has yet increased even further.
There are a lot more contributors now than a month ago.
elmapul Mar 21, 2020
Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: elmapulhonestly, this thing is worse than clickteam fusion was 20 years ago, back when it was called multimedia fusion.
not to mention construct 3...
You're talking about entirely professionally made software, from teams that have been building such game engines and editors for a very long time. It's incredibly unfair to compare them together in such a way and it's WAY more powerful than Clickteam stuff from 20 years ago (hello, I used it all TGF/MMF everything) that's a big overstatement.

Speaking from my own experience, GDevelop is a vast improvement to what it was a year or so ago. They are doing good work and this last year has seen quick progression on it.

Quoting: elmapulwell, its getting there, but trying to make any serious game on it, right now, would be an waste of time.
Well, Hyperspace Dogfights was made with it and that game is seriously cool.

Sounds like you could be giving this feedback to them. Have you opened any tickets with them on GitHub or anywhere else? If they don't know about issues stopping people, they can't look to solve them.


You're talking about entirely professionally made software, from teams that have been building such game engines and editors for a very long time.
construct? the last time i checked their team was about 2 persons, oh, and it was 3 when it was open source, then they gave up on not receiving much help from thirdy parties nor receiving money and restarted as closed source.
i dont know about the size of the team from clickteam, but that dont change the fact:
if you want to make an sucessful game, an game to compete on the market, or just to learn, those tools are better.

as for the issue, i cant download much stuff now since my HDD broken and i'm on a live cd, but their UI on the event editor was ridiculous big...

about the game, it looks good.


Last edited by elmapul on 21 March 2020 at 6:52 am UTC
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