Well, depends on what do you call basic. You may think Tetris or Angry Bird is a basic game but in-fact it does require the same as any other games if you can make those from scratch then you can make anything. But in case you mean nobody made any big games like Diablo, that is because for one thing, most people start using GD are complete beginners who don’t know anything about game development or very little. So they start making simple games and after that, mostly 2 things happening. The people think realistically and don’t even try to make a big game, they are happy with making small things that you would call “basic”, or they try but fail because of lack of experience this is what you wold call “unfinished” I guess or get to the point when they are stretching the limits of GD or need a certain feature GD does not have and they need to move on to a more advanced engine and therefore not many people are finishing and sharing big games here.
That is because the Android games are HTML5 games wrapped in to an Android app using PhoneGap and Crodova. Old devices running Android 4 have a hard time running these games. In case you are using HTML5 for Android, you want to consider to set Android 6 or 7 as the minimum requirement. But from my experience GDevelop is also generally slower then most other HTML5 game engines out there. I have experimented a lot with this and when it comes to performance, GDevelop is pretty slow compared to others, but the most simple to use except Construct 2. So I think you need to decide what is more important to you. Being easy and free or being fast. But frankly, if you already know you do want to target Android I recommend to choose something that natively export to Android, GD is not native. It is wrapping HTML5. The most simple solution is AppGameKit. It does require coding and it is not free, but it is using very simple and very easy to use commands like SetSpritePosition() for example. Not more difficult than using the event in GDevelop to “Set the position”, except in AGK you do need to set up your own content management system. It may scary if you don’t know how to code but once you get familiar with using arrays, types and loops, it is not that difficult and it gives you more freedom and more control. If you want to make an open world game with no loading screen, you definitely want to have full control over what is stored in memory and when and what is being rendered on the screen and when something is triggered on what. It is something that GDevelop does not allow you to control. But in return it is easy, so it is also something that you need to consider if you need control or you want it to be easy. AGK in my opinion sit nicely in the middle, not too complicated yet offer lot of control.
People constantly reporting problems with adsense, it does not work for many and they decide not to use it I guess. I never tried it. IAP is not available in GDevelop.
I tried to make an isometric game in GDevelop with detailed animations and sprites, the reason I failed was because the size and quantity of the images caused extreme long loading times, several minutes on my gaming PC and on a much slower devices I could not even wait for the loading to finish. The loading time can be reduced by using Atlas images, but it is not supported in GD. I switched to a 3D engines since also because I was using 3D models anyway for the 2D graphics and using a 3D engine solved all the problems I had and I don’t use GD since. I do follow because I think it great, but I’m no longer using it myself.
Technically yes, but it is a lot of trouble, the fact you are using events instead of a programming language means absolutely nothing when things becoming complex. What really matters is how well you can design the different parts of the game but I find the events limiting at such scale. Events are made with a certain use case in mind, when you are trying to combine these events to setup your logic to fit your case, often you don’t get the results you want because of the way the events are working internally. You need to start working around these limitations and bugs caused by the internal design of the events which is can be challenging even if you have a good understanding of how certain events works internally under the hood.
Technically can do, but in open world games you do really want to take control of how content is loaded and stored in memory. In GD you have no such control and the events are triggered for every single instances, you may end up using lot of resources only to check when to trigger certain events on which objects because you are going to have a lot of them in an open world game. In case you are going to be using GD you do need to brake your game up in to scenes.
You can develop games in GD4 for Windows, Linux, OSX and HTML5 but not all the features are shared, I believe you can find a list of the features on the home page. In GD5 you can develop only for HTML5 right now
No and it is not planned to my knowledge.
GD does not support collaboration specifically. You can not merge different version in to one easily. Someone need to grab the work of all people and put it together in to one project by hand. 4ian (or a contributor, can’t remember) did actually tried to make the GD projects modular so you could export import events and layouts separately and we also had the option to share events online but it has not been maintained after all. Last time I tried it was broken, reported it but has not been solved to my knowledge, and it was GD4 only, GD5 does not support this at all.
In HTML5 no, in GD4 desktop we have basic lighting but people reported rendering glitches and it is also limited, you can have only a single dynamic light in the scene.
GD got particle system but just like with lights people reported bugs and crashes all the time when used. I believe GD5 did received a new particle system, I have no experience with that.
Yes and NO. For 2 years it have been maintained by a contributor (Victor). In the past 6 months or so, the developer is actively working on GD5 and by that I mean weekends but I did not see many improvements in the actual engine so far. I would say it is maintained only. In theory the developer do plan to bring new features at some point, but no information is shared and nothing has been confirmed. In case you stick around, be prepared the developer won’t share lot of information regarding the plans and what is being developed. It may change in the future but an other thing worth not here is that, the developer prefer to discuss development on GitHub, you won’t see lot of conversation here on the forum. The “Feature request” and “Improve GD” topics are no longer used by the developer for discussions, and also when it comes to discussions 4ian prefer to have a conversaion at a technical level about why a = function(){} is better than b = function(){} and this is why he prefer GitHub which do makes sense. What doesn’t make sense in my opinion though is that he seem to completely ignoring the users. People on GitHub are not necessarily users, they are programmers playing around with the source of GD but not using it therefore real users can’t really expect to get the features and fixes they need. I feel the development of GD uncertain at this point, I don’t really understand what direction it going or what is planned and it seems to contiue rely on contribution on GitHub which is only make it even less certain it future and the direction it going.
Hope it helps.
By the time a good developer gets to the point in their game with GD, many changes on the dev side will have been made anyhow. If a part of what you need is currently not a function, move on and request it, and have patience and Im sure if it is viable for the development of GD, it will be implemented.
He is the boss and if he is not interested in maintaining something in the core product he won’t include it. Of course I can understand why, I’m not blaming him or anything but it still sucks.
. Keeping resources in memory is odd in GDevelop but easy, sound in your initiation events just play the sounds then pause on channels, then simply play the channels in the game when needed and it’s always loaded. Images are the same, as are animations, put them where you need them, hide them and shows them when needed…not pretty but works very well.
