What is free here, and what is not

Flockbay is built on Godot, which is open source under a permissive licence. That is not a promotional arrangement that can be withdrawn. It is the engine your game actually runs on, and it does not cost anything.

Your project is a Godot project on your own disk. If you stopped using this app tomorrow, Godot would still open it and you would still have your game. That is worth checking before you invest time in any tool, including this one.

Your monthly plan takes no share of what you sell. Publishing to Steam through the app is a separate paid step that does, and the figures are shown before you submit.

The AI. Every time Director 1 writes code or something gets generated, that runs on hardware somebody pays for. Pretending otherwise would mean either a very limited free tier dressed up as generosity, or a business that stops existing.

So that is the part you pay for. Indie at $10 a month unlocks the AI assistance: Director 1 writing your gameplay logic, and texture, sound effect, prop and character rig generation. The free plan includes a limited trial of those features, so you can see what they do before deciding.

What stays free is everything you do yourself. In a 3D project that is the landscape, the water, the weather, the time of day, the cameras and NPC behaviour. In a flat one it is the tile ground you paint, the sky and band of scenery behind it, the numbers that decide how the person walks and jumps, and the sprites you place. Both sides include your own textures, sound effects, props and character rigs, play and preview, and sharing with playtesters. No watermark on any of it.

Compared to a fully free path, which is downloading Godot yourself and learning GDScript. That path costs nothing and costs months. If you enjoy learning to program, it is genuinely a good option and this page is not going to argue against it.

Compared to browser tools with free tiers, the trade is different. Those are free to start and constrained by the tab: small scenes, limited memory, reduced graphics. Here the engine and your hardware are unconstrained and the AI is metered.

The obvious way to split that is by dimension: browser tools for 2D, a download for 3D. That is the wrong line. A flat game here is a project you pick at creation, from two pictures, and it opens already running — a person walking and jumping over ground you widen by dragging, with 55,073 of the Catalogue's 60,648 objects available to place as sprites.

What running locally actually decides is the same in either case: whether the game plays at your machine's framerate, and whether the project is a folder you own. For a 3D world with terrain and weather it also decides whether the thing is possible at all, which is a third argument on top rather than the only one.

It is a desktop app for Mac and Windows. You download and install it, and it ships with Godot inside it. The game runs on your machine.

Building needs an internet connection, because the AI and world data come over the network. Playing what you built does not.

There is no team, per-seat or enterprise plan. It is a desktop app licensed per person. The builder is free, and Indie at $10 a month unlocks the AI assistance.

It is worth being clear about the shape of the trade rather than promising an unlimited free tier and quietly enforcing limits later.

AI usage costs real money per request. A free plan that gave unlimited AI assistance would not survive, so Free includes a trial of those features and Indie at $10 a month unlocks them.

You will know whether you want the AI doing that work after a week of using it, which is why the download and the free plan exist. Nothing here requires a decision before you have seen the tool.

It stops at the AI. Building the world by hand has nothing metered on it; the trial of Director 1 and generation does, and long sessions of asking for large systems or a lot of generated art use it up quickly.

That is worth knowing, because the part of the work that takes the longest — shaping the landscape, the water, the weather and the light in a 3D project, or painting ground and arranging sprites in a flat one — is the part that costs nothing.

A first small project usually fits comfortably. A sustained project with a lot of generated art is where a paid plan starts to make sense, and by then you will know whether the tool is worth it to you.