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GDevelop is a game engine that allows you to develop a video game without any specific development experience. While the ‘no code’ trend has been quite popular this year, GDevelop has been around for a few years now.
Florian Rival started working on GDevelop as an open source side project. The first public version on GitHub was released in 2014.
With GDevelop, I wanted game development to be as accessible as possible. You can start GDevelop from a web browser or install it on your computer. You can start from a template, modify it and test it whenever you want.
GDevelop specifically targets 2D games as it is more accessible to both gamers and developers. When it comes to level design, you can simply drag and drop objects onto the scene.
Regarding the design of the game, you can see all the mechanics of the game from the Events tab. Everything is described with one condition and one action: if the player is jumping, animate the character with the ‘jump’ animation.
There are many actions that come with GDevelop by default. And if you want to do something a little specific, there is an extension system that allows you to add some logic to your game. Developers can also create their own extension if they want to go further. An extension is a set of conditions and actions, or JavaScript code.
GDevelop leverages web technologies to render the game, such as WebGL, JavaScript, and WebAssembly. When you are ready to export your game, you can export it to the web or turn it into an Android game. On average, half of GDevelop users export their games to Android.
Image credits: GDevelop
Over the years, GDevelop has attracted some interesting metrics. There are hundreds of games on the presentation page of the GDevelop website. Some games created in GDevelop have become quite popular. For example, Vai Juliette reached the number 1 and number 2 places in the most important free download charts on the Play Store and App Store in Brazil. Represents more than a million downloads.
Some developers spend a lot of time working on complex games with GDevelop and release them on Steam or Itch.io. Some brands also use the engine to create promotional games and support a new product launch.
“My dream is for the next Among Us to be developed using GDevelop”, Florian Rival
For all those reasons, Florian Rival is building a company around GDevelop and now works full time on the game engine. The startup recently raised a $ 1.4 million funding round led by Seedcamp, with the participation of Secretfund, Kima Ventures, Ascension, Jabre Capital Partners, The Fund, and Foreword.vc. Some business angels also invested, such as Michael Pennington, Ross Sheil, Emmanuel Nataf, Will Neale and Ian Hogarth.
The six-person team is iterating on the open source game engine to make it better and better. When it comes to monetization, GDevelop doesn’t want to launch a commercial engine. Thanks to the MIT license, game developers still own 100% of their games that they developed with GDevelop.
Instead, the company is looking at services that might be useful to GDevelop users. For example, GDevelop could offer a one-click export solution to launch a game and monetize it.
Many mobile game developers rely on ads to generate income. But integrating ads into your game can be tricky. Developers could choose to integrate ads with GDevelop’s own advertising feature – the startup would keep ad revenue cut.
Essentially, as long as GDevelop remains popular, there will be different ways to create revenue streams to support future development.