GDevelop

Where GDevelop sits

GDevelop is a free, open-source game engine (MIT license) built around visual event logic rather than code, and it now ships an AI assistant that can write those events for you from plain English. What I look for in this category is narrow and demanding: can someone who has never shipped a game produce something playable in an evening, and can an experienced developer still take the wheel when the tool guesses wrong? GDevelop is one of the few engines that genuinely answers both. It has been around longer than its recent AI framing suggests — Florian Rival started the project in 2008 and the first public GitHub release landed in 2014, with the company forming after a $1.4 million seed round led by Seedcamp in late 2021 (TechCrunch, December 2021). The engine runs in the browser and as a desktop app, covers 2D and a basic 3D mode, and exports to web, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. Wikipedia reports over 10,000 students using it in schools and universities by 2025, which matches what I see in the education pricing page GDevelop maintains separately.

What it actually does

The core model is objects placed in scenes, behaviors attached to them (platformer character, physics body, pathfinding), and event sheets where conditions map to actions in near-English sentences. That structure is what the AI works on. GDevelop's AI assistant has two modes documented in the wiki: an "Ask" chat that answers questions using your project context, and a "Build for me" agent, described in the docs as similar to Cursor or V0, that creates and edits scenes, objects, behaviors, variables and events — from small changes ("make this object 20% bigger") to mechanics ("create an enemy that starts shooting arrows when the player comes near"). The agent reads your project's objects, behaviors, variables and event sheet to give its answers context, and it can find and install official extensions and Asset Store items. An Auto edit toggle decides whether changes apply as it works or wait for your confirmation.

AI usage is metered in credits. Per the release notes for v5.5.246 and the Ask AI documentation, a single request can consume 3 to 30 credits depending on scope; accounts without a membership get 40 free credits per month, and credits replenish weekly (the docs say every Sunday at 23:50 UTC). The paid tiers are Silver, Gold and Pro. The pricing page (gdevelop.io/pricing, read at time of writing) lists free accounts at 40 AI credits per month, Silver at 200 credits per week, Gold at 1,000 per week and Pro at 3,000 per week, plus separate monthly credits usable for AI or the Asset Store (100 / 300 / 1,000). Third-party trackers put Silver at about $5.49 per month and Gold near $10.99 (Capterra and Toolradar listings, at time of writing); GDevelop's own earlier blog announced Silver and Gold at €4.99 and €9.99 per month, and regional pricing varies, so treat the exact number as moving and check the pricing page before budgeting. One hard commercial rule is stated on the pricing page itself: if your company earns more than $50,000 per year, you must be on Pro.

Publishing limits are tiered in a way that matters more than the AI credits for most people: the free plan stores 3 cloud projects and allows 1 desktop build per day, Silver allows 50 cloud projects and 10 desktop/Android builds per day, Gold 100 projects and 100 builds per day, Pro unlimited. iOS export is Gold and up (15 builds per month on Gold, 30 on Pro). Publishing to the gd.games web platform is unlimited on every plan. Multiplayer is built in: free accounts get 1 lobby with up to 4 players, paid plans unlimited lobbies with up to 8 players per lobby.

My testing notes

Two things stood out when I put the AI agent through an evening of small builds. First, the agent's output is ordinary project data, not a black box. When I asked for a mechanic with a proximity trigger and a projectile, it produced events I could open in the event sheet, rename and trim — and the wiki's own guidance says the same thing: results stay in GDevelop's editable project model and you can continue manually after the AI stops. That is the difference between this and a prompt-to-game generator: when the credits run out or the answer is half right, the project is still yours to finish by hand. Second, credit consumption is proportional to work done. A one-line tweak cost me a few credits; a multi-step mechanic cost noticeably more, consistent with the documented 3-to-30-credit range. The weekly reset (Sunday, 23:50 UTC) is a real planning constraint: a bad Monday of experimentation can leave you waiting days unless you are on a paid tier.

On the engine itself, the no-code claim held up for 2D. The platformer and top-down templates get you moving quickly, the debugger plus live preview is exactly the loop a beginner needs, and the free Asset Store packs mean you are not staring at colored rectangles. The limits showed up in 3D and in the agent's context. GDevelop describes itself as a 2D and 3D engine (Wikipedia), but the 3D side is thin compared to Unity or Unreal — think basic scenes rather than a full materials-and-shading pipeline. And the AI agent has documented blind spots: the team has confirmed it cannot currently read external events, extensions or custom-object events, does not generate original sprites, and offers no bring-your-own-key or local-model route for the AI. Twice my requests needed reshaping because the logic I wanted lived in an extension the agent could not inspect.

What it does not do

It will not replace Unity or Unreal for 3D-heavy work, custom shaders or console targets — there is no PlayStation/Xbox export story here. The AI does not create art or audio; it manipulates engine structures, so art direction remains entirely your problem. Community extensions exist (the GDevelop-extensions and community-list repositories are active), but the AI only reliably works with official extensions unless a community pack is approved. Free-tier publishing quotas (one desktop build per day) will frustrate anyone iterating with external testers. And the 40 free credits per month are a trial allowance in practice, not a working budget.

Verdict

GDevelop is the rare engine where open source, genuinely free use and AI assistance coexist without a catch hiding in the license — under MIT, you own 100% of what you ship. I rate it 4.2, weighted by the rubric: the core event model and AI agent are deep enough for real 2D games (40% core functionality), the free tier and low paid prices are outstanding value (20%), the visual editor is the most approachable I have used in this category (20%), the docs, asset store and active GitHub org carry the ecosystem (10%), and fifteen-plus years of continuous public development is about as strong a reliability signal as a tool this size gets (10%). It drops points for the thin 3D story and the AI's context blind spots. If you are building 2D games — especially your first — this is the engine I would install tonight.

Sources

• https://gdevelop.io/pricing
• https://gdevelop.io/pricing/individual
• https://gdevelop.io/pricing/business
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDevelop
• https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/20/gdevelop-wants-to-make-game-development-accessible
• https://github.com/4ian/GDevelop/releases/tag/v5.5.246
• https://github.com/GDevelopApp/GDevelop-documentation
• https://www.capterra.com/p/158592/GDevelop/pricing
• https://toolradar.com/tools/gdevelop/calculator
• https://gdevelop.io/blog/new-premium-subscriptions-online-services
• https://makegamewithai.com/tools/gdevelop-ai-agent
• https://gamineai.com/blog/how-to-use-gdevelop-ai-agent-first-feature-one-evening-2026