| I have had great fun making some simple games in GDevelop! If you know a bit about programming and have an idea for a silly multimedia project, I highly recommend giving it a go. The visual interface building tool makes it really easy to slap together a GUI or a game map, and the low-code programming interface makes adding simple logic (and sound effects!) pretty quick too. It did take me a little while to wrap my head around the programming interface, though. There are many things that I like about it, now that I understand it, but I think there’s also some room for improvement.[0] Working on my little experiments, I felt like I was often relying on some knowledge of other game programming tools to help me guess what functions to look for in GDevelop, and to build an intuition for how the system was working. So I think GDevelop does a great job of making it easy to code something up quickly. But I don’t think that I would recommend it as a first step into programming, since I think that building up some familiarity with “how programming works” in a more conventional language will make stepping into GDevelop much easier. If you’re interested interested in making simple games and want something one step more conventional, I highly recommend MakeCode Arcade. It’s a more limited tool than GDevelop—it’s just for simple arcade-style games—but it’s an absolute joy to use. [0]: I love that GDevelop lets me browse through the API without leaving the app, for example… but somehow I still seem to spend a lot of time looking things up on the wiki. I would love for them to find a way to build even more of that documentation into the application itself! |
I teach “media arts” classes at an art school for young people. (Most of my classes are for 6-8 tear olds or 9-12 year olds.)
Some of my colleagues have used GDevelop in their classes, but the projects have been focused on re-skinning the examples that come bundled with GDevelop. That seems to be a big hit with our students!
Once they have done that, though, they naturally want to start modifying the actual gameplay. And while GDevelop makes that easier than it would be in other tools… it’s still too complex for a short class that isn’t explicitly focused on learning programming.
I haven’t tried Makecode Arcade in the classroom yet, but it’s similar to (and simpler than?) Scratch, which other colleagues have had success with.
So that’s the background for my recommendation of Arcade as the place to start, and GDevelop as the next step after you have outgrown Arcade.