Happy New Year and Welcome to 2025!

Happy New Year! As we say goodbye to 2024, we want to extend a huge thank you to all of you – creators, contributors, students, freelancers, and video game studios – who use GDevelop.

It’s you, who by your contributions and using the game engine give life to it and make it grow. The engine is growing and gaining popularity among game developers from all around the world, and ranking in lists like the most popular game engines used for the Global Game Jam 2024 and the Most Popular Game Engines on GitHub.

It’s also thanks to your feedback on the forum and bug reports on GitHub that we are able to enhance and deliver the best version of the engine with every update.

GDevelop is open-source and also has a commercial entity, the GDevelop company, which provides cloud accounts and services: the Asset Store, projects in the cloud, leaderboards, multiplayer lobbies, cloud builds… These services can be used with either a free account or a paid membership that unlocks additional perks. A few months ago, we decided to offer 7-day free trials to all new users on Google Play and the App Store, and we‘ll extend this offer in 2025. You can find all of the perks by comparing the plans on our website.

To take advantage of this offer, simply start your first subscription through the mobile app, and the free trial will be applied upon confirmation.

Throwback to 2024

2024 has been a year full of major milestones. Let’s revisit some of the most requested features, unexpected surprises, and major events. Read to the end to see what 2025 has in store!

• Without a doubt the most requested feature has been the Tilemap editor. It allows developers to quickly draw, edit, and remove chunks of their game. This has been released in its first version, which has been warmly welcomed. We already have ideas for improving it, like by adding layers to the Tilemap object.
• Secondly, we have the easy-to-use, super simple multiplayer lobbies, that makes it unbelievably easy to connect and play fun games with your friends (with or without a player account)
• Thirdly, another major addition was 3D. We know you've dreamed of creating an FPS or third person experience in GDevelop, and that's why you will now be able to throw objects and more with the built-in 3D physics engine. Just like the 2D physics behavior, all you need to do is add the new 3D physics behavior to your object to turn it into a 3D physics object.
  The feature is now fully ready. We decided to use a battle-tested, modern physics engine called Jolt, which is used in a number of AAA games such as Horizon Forbidden West or War Thunder.
• The smart object visual editor is a feature that will make your game more scalable, it helps you to easily create and share your own objects, like the dialog box object, new buttons, a score counter, a stars rating bar and more.
• We know marketing a game and getting feedback from players can be challenging. So we created an automated process to help you in this task. Once your game is published, you will be able to get a Marketing Boost, which will funnel new players coming from TikTok and other social media platforms to your game hosted on gd.games.
• The new Spine object, an open-source contribution that lets you easily import Spine skeletal creations into GDevelop to make fluid and smooth animated characters and backgrounds.
• Dozens of new extensions and behaviors, like 3D raycasting, Car physics, the Shock wave effect, a 3rd person camera… as well as a ton of improvements to the interface -- reducing the cumbersome object dialogs, we added an object preview in the properties panel, that lets you edit your object without opening it to streamline the development speed.

This was the first year that the GDevelop team went to the Paris Games Week, a well known exposition where the public can discover and play upcoming games. This year, a booth “Create your own game” with GDevelop was present, and we met users from the community in person and got live feedback from new users, which led to bug fixes within 24 hours, right in the middle of the show!

But most importantly of all, it's you who make great games. So we've put some of this year's best games into a big end of year celebration video. Whether you shared it with us on social media or were a game jam winner, let's take a look at the games that made 2024 a record breaking year.

What’s coming in 2025?

While we never make a fully specified roadmap - because things evolve according to feedback, new services the GDevelop company is building, and open-source contributors building what they find most important, we can still share some experiments we’re working on:

• We’re working to get a “fully usable” 3D editor, with a free-look camera. This will allow easier building of 3D levels.
• In the same vein, we’re prototyping an editor that has a 100% fidelity with the in-game rendering. This is an opportunity to both simplify the codebase and introduce game real-time rendering inside the editor.
• We’re thinking about how to make GDevelop games more visible and be able to promote them all, big or small, inside the community and to the whole world. Games are made to be played!
• We’re aiming to publish more chapters to the new in-app curriculum, to let new users master the engine and existing users discover everything they can do with GDevelop. We’ll publish more courses in the future if this is successful and appreciated by the community.

We're in the early stages of these changes, which will be implemented over the coming months. To find out more about where we're heading, we've updated our roadmap for 2025 - which is a big list of medium-to-large ideas for the future of GDevelop.
Vote for your favorite features, and leave us a comment about what you’re hoping to see in 2025.

Happy New Year,
The GDevelop team