AI game maker, online and free: half of that is true here
Free, yes. Online, no. Stage Engine is a download, and the reason is the same reason your game will run at a decent framerate.
Sorting out the two words
Free is accurate. The download costs nothing, there is a free plan, and you do not need a card to start. Indie is $10 a month and Pro is $50 if you want more usage later.
Online is not. Stage Engine is a desktop application for Mac and Windows. You download it, you install it, and it runs on your computer. There is no version that opens in a tab and there is not going to be one.
If a browser tool is a hard requirement — a locked-down machine, a Chromebook, no permission to install — then stop here rather than downloading something that will not run. That is a real constraint and it is not one we can talk you out of.
What the download buys
Your game runs on your own hardware, on the copy of Godot bundled inside the app. Your framerate is your machine's framerate. Your memory is your machine's memory.
That is why the worlds can be worlds. Browser tools keep scenes small because a tab has a hard budget, which is why they steer you toward flat spaces with a handful of objects. Terrain, water, weather and a populated landscape are a normal thing to attempt when the process is native.
It also means your project lives on your disk, as a real Godot project, rather than in a database somewhere. Nothing about it depends on us staying online.
It is still connected, just not hosted
This distinction confuses people, so worth being exact. Building needs an internet connection: Director 1 writes your code through a model over the network, and asset generation and world data come the same way. There is no offline mode.
What is local is the running of your game and the editing of your world. You are not streaming an editor from a server and you are not watching a video of your own game.
So the accurate description is a local app with online services behind the AI, rather than a cloud tool or an offline tool.
What you do inside it
You build the world by hand — terrain, water, weather, structures, characters, placed and shaped in a builder that works like a level editor.
Director 1 writes the GDScript for the behaviour you describe. You do not read it unless you want to. You play the game and say whether it is right, and it revises. That is the loop.
Nothing about this requires you to know an engine or a language, which is usually what people mean when they search for an easy online tool. The ease is real. The delivery mechanism is a download.
The free plan, honestly
It is the same engine and the same builder as the paid plans. What Indie and Pro buy is more usage of Director 1 and generation, because those cost us money per request.
That means the free plan is a genuine way to find out whether this suits you, and not a demo with the interesting parts greyed out.
If you were hoping to work across two machines
This comes up a lot with people searching for online tools, and it is a fair thing to want. Your project lives on your disk, so it does not follow you between machines by itself.
The normal answer is the same one every desktop developer uses: put the project in version control or a synced folder. It is an ordinary Godot project, so nothing special is required to do that.
Install the app on both machines and sign in on both. The plan is attached to you rather than to a computer.
Questions
- Can I use it in a browser?
- No. It is a desktop app for Mac and Windows and it has to be installed.
- Is it really free?
- The download is free, the free plan is free, and no card is needed. Indie is $10 a month and Pro is $50 for more usage.
- Why not make a browser version?
- Because a tab cannot run the kind of world this is built for. Running natively is what makes terrain, weather and populated scenes reasonable.
- Does it work offline then?
- No. Building needs a connection for the AI and generation. Playing what you built runs locally and does not.
- Will it run on a Chromebook?
- No. It needs a Mac or a Windows PC.