I have been using GDevelop for years to build smaller games and prototype ideas. For the past 4 months, I have been pouring my heart, soul, and endless hours into an ambitious, complex project that I genuinely intended to finish, release, and sell on Steam.
When you first start, GDevelop feels like absolute magic because of how incredibly beginner-friendly it is. The visual event system allows you to bring ideas to life rapidly without touching traditional code. Its clean interface and instant preview feature make prototyping small projects a total breeze. The built-in behaviors save you massive amounts of time when you are just learning the ropes. It genuinely makes game development accessible, giving you the wonderful illusion that the sky is the limit here.
However, once your project grows beyond a basic prototype, reality hits you like a truck. The biggest nightmare is the updates; almost every single engine update has the potential to silently alter, override, or completely break your existing event lines, destroying weeks of fine-tuned logic overnight.
Furthermore, deep-rooted bugs especially regarding variable management and complex data are consistently left unfixed, making it practically impossible to build a highly complicated game with deep systems. You will eventually reach a brick wall where you spend 90% of your time fighting the engine’s internal bugs rather than actually designing your game.
Ultimately, if your goal is to make a serious, professional, or commercial product, investing your time in this engine is a complete dead end.
How he made it if its not possible to make complex game in gdevelop?
I also asked few users in gdevelop discord to show off their complex games here
Maybe it will add to confusion
I would like to politely inform you that that claim of GDevelop being unable to handle complex projects is false. The InBetween have been built with the exact same engine as far back as 2021 all the way to 2026, now.
The events were built in a way that allows scalability, and I can relate with your troubles, it happened to me a few times. The trick for me, was to make sure that foundation of my game’s code was so tight that it could even be backwards compatible.
So there is frankly, no illusion. Just like any other engine out there, the ultimate barrier to the things we can make is still our skills as developers. I had been told that making a hand drawn metroidvania would be impossible with GDevelop and I would have believed it at the time, since I didn’t see anything I could take inspiration from over here, until more recently.
You can do some pretty complex projects in gdevelop. I’m making a fully 3D monster taming rpg and haven’t needed to write actual code and can do just about anything with events alone. I have a screenshot from the project and although the game is far from finished, I think the project looks good and it’s very impressive what gdevelop is capable of and how good performance is when you optimize.
