Quickly Build 2D
Games in
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GDevelop
Go exploring
GDevelop opens to a welcome screen [Image A], with the
choice to open a project, create a new project, or search the
documentation. Choose ‘Open Project’, and if you look in
your installation directory, you’ll have game tutorials and
templates installed, which from GDevelop’s main folder
should be under ‘resources/examples’ [Image B].
The screen is broken into three tabs: Start Page; Scene; and
Scene (Events). When you open or start a project, GDevelop
opens the Scene tab, so let’s begin there.
On the left is Properties, a fold-out pane that displays the
properties of any object you click within a scene. In the centre
is the scene itself, and you can zoom in and out with your
mouse wheel. On the right is the Objects pane, where you
create your game objects, then drag them on to the scene
in the middle.
If you open the New Scene (Events) tab, you’ll see the
programmed events that determine how your game will
work. This is the hardest part of GDevelop, but we’ll have a
taste of this later for a basic demo.
GDevelop’s welcome screen boasts that this 2D game maker is “an easy-to-use creator with no
programming language to learn.” Being Java-based, it runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS, or
you can try it online. Publishing is even better. The license states you can publish, sell, or do
anything you like with your games. And you can export to Linux, Windows, Mac, Android,
HTML5, and even Facebook Messenger (full iOS support is coming soon). But what about
that claim it has “no programming language to learn”? Let’s have a closer look.
If you want to run it on Windows, then installation is straightforward – simply head to
https://gdevelop-app.comGRZQORDGWKH(;(ÀOHDQGWKHQUXQLW
And while you’re at it, you should also search for GDevelop resources on Itch (http://itch.
io). You’ll discover a ton of tips, tricks and templates, plus lots of free Windows games (some
of which are made in GDevelop). The most interesting way to explore GDevelop is to open
some tutorials and mess around, so let’s start there. John KnightYOU’LL NEED THISGDEVELOP
Grab the Windows app from
https://gdevelop-app.com.Lastly, there is the main toolbar on the top-right.
These buttons change when you swap between the
New Scene and New Scene (Events) tabs, but one
button that stays the same is the Play button on the
left, which enables you to test the game.Making a mess
You can now take a template and start playing
around. A good place to start is the game objects
themselves. In the Objects pane, right-click an item
and choose Edit Object. The new window is separated
into two tabs: Properties and Behaviors. Normally the
window is opened in the Properties tab, but let’s get
the Behaviors tab out of the way first.
In the Behaviors tab, you can add behaviours for
simple things, such as deleting an object that has left
the screen, or something more complex, such as
altering an object’s physics. Just click the Add button
to introduce a behaviour, and press the Rubbish icon
to delete it again. Scroll down, though, because while
some behaviours don’t have any options to choose
from, others have plenty of options to tweak.
Back in the Properties tab, you have the name for
your object, as well as for any sprite animations.
When you have some animation loaded, you can
fine-tune the controls with looping options, speed
controls, and a handy preview function. If you’re
starting with a blank object, click the ‘+’ sign on the
right to add an animation. You can have multiple
animations, each with independent names, speeds,
and looping controls.
If you already have some image files to work with,
click the ‘+’ sign on the left to open a file browser, and
choose whatever you want. Otherwise, to just start
drawing your own frames, select ‘Edit with Piskel’,
which opens GDevelop’s sprite editor.
Crucial to game making are Edit Hitboxes and Edit
Points. Hitboxes are invisible zones that define a
sprite’s collision detection. If you disable the two
sliders that share boxes across all sprites and
animations, you can have independent hitboxes for
each frame. This allows more refined collision
detection, vital for a Street Fighter-style game, where
each frame has a vastly different collision area.A44 |^ |^ May 2019