GDevelop 5.1 is Here! What's New?

A new major version of GDevelop is now out! GDevelop 5.1 is focused on ease of use and the development of connected services around the GDevelop editor as well as in the games themselves. Let's take a closer look.

New Cloud Services

You need to create, regardless of where you are or the device you're using. GDevelop's free and premium subscriptions have been completely revamped, adding much more functionality, including project and asset cloud saves and sync, player feedback, leaderboards, and more.

The Free tier also gets cloud upgrades and new features (including cloud saves and sync, asset uploads, and more), and as always, unlimited local builds.

You can find out all of the advantages of paid subscriptions on the Pricing page.

Core GDevelop and Engine Improvements

There have been a lot of improvements and changes made to the core GDevelop engine and the app itself, such as:

• Vast improvements to the physics engine, including a switch to the WebAssembly version of Box2D.
• New tween actions for camera rotation and camera zoom (thanks arthuro555!)
• Huge improvements to tilemaps, including fixing of tilemaps with invalid resources and empty tile margins, placeholders for tilemaps with invalid resources, borders around the collision mask in the editor, and more.
• Collision masks for tilemaps have also been improved, with automatic reading of masks created by Tiled 1.9+, and the possibility of using multiple collision masks.
• An option to preload audio files without decoding them (thanks dos1!), so even if the connection is lost the file is available in cache, but without a huge performance hit for decoding which could cause lower-end devices to crash.
• Fixes for the physics engine contacts/collisions between objects, which were not detected when they happened shortly between frames.
• New touch conditions that make it possible to handle touch events without conflicting with the scene events sheet. Existing conditions will continue to work alongside these new conditions (backwards compatibility).
• A new action to specify the camera is inside a set boundary.
• Size actions and conditions for Sprites and Tiled Sprites have been added.
• Fixes for the raycast condition.
• Custom collision masks support for the draggable behavior.
• Automatic generation of a WebManifest for exported web games (thanks @arthuro555!) - so that games have a proper icon and orientation when a shortcut is added to the home screen on Android or iOS.
• Dozens of improvements to the P2P extension.
• Allow to wait for a network request action to end before running other actions (thanks @arthuro555!).
• Add a toggle to show community made (unreviewed) extensions when browsing extensions.
• Various speed improvements and improved drag'n'drop of events in the events sheet.
• And more!

Listening to and Acting on Community Feedback

You spend hours in the editor, and we get feedback every day. Thank you so much for that! Notably, in addition to the core engine improvements, we've worked on this:

• A lot of you wanted to use your own assets on the web app. So that feature has now been added!
• GDevelop's new cloud save system (see above) also allows you to save and retrieve your projects and their assets, wherever you are.
• A new Wait X seconds action has been introduced. This action allow to wait for a few seconds before continuing to run the next actions and sub-events
• Error Highlight has also been improved - you can see directly in the events sheet if an expression has a syntax error.
• As well as a complete revamp of the Variable Editor. This should allow you to more simply and efficiently navigate and set up any kind of variable.
• A new Text Input Object has been added, which allows players to write inside of a box. This is a great way way to create an in-game chat system, for example!

New Possibilities, New Horizons

New features can bring more ideas and different dynamics to your games. Leaderboards are a popular way of making your games more social but can be difficult to implement. The new Leaderboards feature in GDevelop makes it easier for you to create and implement it in your games. You can try it in this new game example.

There are now multiple games with more than 1000 scores submitted to their Leaderboards. Ball Challenge 2 has multiple leaderboards that add up to over 131.000 scores submitted on this game alone! This is a great example of just how scalable Leaderboards are for bigger games.

Player Authentication has also been added to display players' nicknames on the leaderboards and reduce the opportunities for cheating. This is an easy way to log in with your GDevelop account on any GDevelop game, whether you are on Android, Windows, Linux, or a web platform like gd.games or Itch.io.

There are more things planned for Player Authentication, including social login, social features for players, and more ways for you as a game creator to interact with your players.

Other Important Features

There's actually been a flurry of updates and new features implemented over the past few weeks and months. Here's a brief overview of some of the things that have been added, changed, or improved.

New Game Templates:

• Ball Cup Boom, Spherez, Absorbus, and Parking Jam: All these games are downloadable on the Google Play Store.
• The Conviction of Gun Dude, Run Dino Run, Bounce and Hook, and Duck Game by content creator Goodgis.

Asset Store Improvements:

• The Isometric City Pack, Pixel Platformer, pzUH, Emotes, Brawler Series, Darkvinter Thumbstick, FootSteps sounds, and Xbox 360 buttons packs have been added.
• Two paid packs by André Holtz, the creator of Ball Challenge 2, have been added.
• Numerous packs have been packaged and/or repackaged with the help of community member Entropy, Leo Red, Buggy Studio, and NoxSound.
  We are glad to see the involvement of the community, so many thanks!

Extensions:

• We are happy to see the community building more extensions each day. As there are more than 15+ new extensions we can't list them all. Open up GDevelop and try them out yourself! We want to say thanks to all the contributors and reviewers!

If you want a more detailed overview of the plethora of new features, check out the changelogs on the GDevelop GitHub page.

Taking Care of New Users

Minimizing the learning curve and transmitting the fundamentals of GDevelop in easy-to-understand ways is extremely important. That's why there's a new Onboarding flow when you launch the web app for the first time.

Onboarding is available in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. You can also launch the guide at any time from the new homepage or start the tour in one-click!

The All-New Homepage

The new homepage has been transformed into a portal, designed to take you where you need to go faster than ever.

All your projects are listed in the Build tab. The best tutorials and educational resources are listed in the Learn tab for people eager to learn. In the Play tab, you can find plenty of fun, including a showcase of games made with GDevelop. Your game could be a part of it one day!

And because the community is an essential part of GDevelop, there's a new Community tab where you'll find relevant news, like our recently-launched Community Advocate Program, as well as the links to all our social media accounts, our Discord server, and the forum.

More to Come!

GDevelop is in constant development, and the changes that are made are directly influenced by community feedback. Community is at the core of what makes GDevelop what it is.

From feedback to events like our game jams (with more than 500 games made for jams and over US$2500 in prizes distributed), to the new Community Advocate Program, and the constant contributions to the core code and extensions, the GDevelop community drives everything we do.

There is always more to come, so stay tuned for future news (including our next game jam before the end of the year!). And if you haven't done so in a while, open up the web app or download GDevelop and see for yourself all that is new and improved in version 5.1.