AI game maker, online and free: half of that is true here

Free, yes. Online, no. Flockbay 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, the world builder costs nothing, and you do not need a card to start. Indie at $10 a month unlocks the AI assistance when you want it, and the free plan lets you try that first.

Online is not. Flockbay 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 game makers keep scenes small because a tab has a hard budget, which is why they steer you toward sparse spaces with a handful of objects in them. Terrain, water, weather and a populated landscape are a normal thing to attempt when the process is native.

Small is the complaint there, not flat, and the two get used as though they were the same word. Flockbay makes flat worlds on purpose — 2D or 3D is a pick when you make the project, two pictures with no default — and a 2D game gets the same native build and the same folder on your disk as a 3D one.

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, and which world is a question asked before anything is created: 2D or 3D, shown as two pictures, with no default.

In 3D that means terrain, water, weather, structures and characters, placed and shaped in a builder that works like a level editor. In 2D it means dragging ground into existence — the tiles, the edges and the collision all fall out of which cells you painted, so what you drag stops a walker straight away — with a sky colour and one band of scenery behind it, and sprites placed, turned and sized by hand in front.

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

The whole builder is on it. In 3D that is terrain, water, weather, light, cameras and NPC behaviour; in 2D it is the tile ground you paint, the backdrop behind it, how the person walks and jumps, and the sprites you place. Your own textures and props, play and playtesting, on both. What $10 a month adds is the AI doing work for you: Director 1 writing the gameplay logic, and generating textures, sounds, props and rigs. You can try those on the free plan before deciding.

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 builder is free, and no card is needed to start. Indie at $10 a month unlocks the AI assistance, with a limited trial of it on the free plan.
Why not make a browser version?
Because the game running on your own machine is the design rather than a stage. Running natively is what makes terrain, weather and populated scenes reasonable in 3D, and in 2D it is what makes the result a build you own instead of a scene living inside somebody's service.
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.