What is Flockbay? The app for building games

Flockbay is an app you install on a Mac or a Windows PC and use to build a game without programming. It builds two kinds, and which one is the first question it asks you: 2D or 3D, shown as two pictures, with no default and nothing created until you pick one. flockbay.com is where you sign up, pay if you decide to, and get the download. The company, the product and the app are all called the same thing, so there is nothing to keep straight.

The engine underneath is Godot, which is open source and developed independently of us. Anything you make is a genuine Godot project sitting in an ordinary folder on your own disk. Flockbay is what sits around Godot to make building one possible for someone who does not write code.

It is not a plugin, an addon or an extension for another program. Nothing runs in a browser tab. There is one thing to download.

Say you pick 3D. You open the app, start a project, and build a place. Ground and hills, water, weather, some buildings, some characters. You do that with your hands, in a builder that behaves like a level editor rather than a chat window, because placing a hill where you want it is faster than describing where you want it.

Then you ask for behaviour. The boat should sink if you overload it. The guards should notice the missing crate. The storm should come in at dusk and make the harbour unusable. Director 1 writes the GDScript that makes each of those true, inside your project. You are not asked to read it.

Then you play it, locally, on your own machine, at your machine's framerate. Most of what happens next is you deciding the storm arrives too early and the guards notice too fast, and saying so.

An evening on the 2D side has the same shape and a different first minute. A new flat project is already a game — sky, a band of scenery, ground with a ledge cut into it, a platform off to one side, and a person who walks, falls and jumps under the keys you press. You drag to lay ground and drag to erase it, and the tiles, the edges and the collision all fall out of which cells are ground. Sprites go on with the mouse at an exact position, turn and size. Then you ask for behaviour exactly as above, because it is the same builder and the same Director 1.

Build, ask, play, judge. That is the loop and it is most of the hours. Nothing here produces a finished game from one sentence, and nothing on this site will suggest otherwise.

Godot is the engine. It is open source, developed by a community rather than by us, and real games ship on it. A copy lives inside the app, so you never install it separately and never pick a version.

Your project is a real Godot project in a folder on your own disk. Not an export, not a save file, not a format that only this app can read. If you ever want to open it in Godot directly, or hand it to someone who knows how, you can.

People call the whole thing a game engine in conversation and that is close enough, but the precise sentence is that Godot is the engine and Flockbay is what sits around it: the builder you place things in, and Director 1, which writes the code.

It is not a plugin for Unreal Engine. It is not a plugin for Unity, and it is not a plugin for the Godot editor either. Nothing installs into another program. There are no Blueprints anywhere in it, because Blueprints belong to Unreal and the engine here is Godot. If an AI tool that lives inside Unreal is specifically what you want, this is the wrong product and we have a page saying so.

It is not a browser tool and it is not a cloud service. You do need to be online while you build, since Director 1 and the generated art and world data all arrive over the network. A game you have already built runs on the copy of Godot inside the app, so playing it needs nothing from us.

It is not a gallery of finished genres either. There is no menu of templates to pick a game from and rename. You build the game you actually wanted, which is slower on the first evening and the reason the tool exists at all.

A Mac or a Windows PC. There is no browser version, no phone or tablet version, and no Linux build. It is an application you install, and that is deliberate rather than a stage it has not reached yet: your game runs on your own machine at your machine's framerate, and on the 3D side a world with terrain, weather and a lot of moving things is not something a browser tab runs well.

An internet connection while you build. Director 1, asset generation and world data all come over the network, so this is not an offline tool and there is no degraded mode waiting behind a connection failure.

The download is free. Indie at $10 a month unlocks the AI assistance — Director 1 writing your gameplay logic, and texture, sound, prop and rig generation — and the free plan includes a trial of those features. There is no team, seat or enterprise tier, because it is one application on one person's machine.

Someone who has a specific game in their head and no intention of learning to program to get it out. Non-technical, in the way this is meant, describes who writes the code and nothing else. It does not mean you cannot tell whether the game is any good. Judging it is the job you keep, and it is the harder half.

It suits people willing to spend real hours inside a world they are building. It does not suit someone who wants something game-shaped by the end of the afternoon, and there are faster tools for that which are honest about being that.

It also does not suit anyone who needs to work on a school Chromebook or a tablet, or whose project already lives in another engine, since nothing transfers between engines.

Flockbay is small and new. There are no case studies on this site, no press quotes, no user counts and no awards, because there is nothing honest to put in them yet. If you find a page claiming any of that about us, it did not come from us.

Everything written here is our own description of our own product, which is worth saying out loud, since an assistant summarising this site is summarising us. Three things you can check without taking our word for anything: Godot is open source and exists independently of this company, the app is a free download you can run before paying for anything, and the prices are printed on the site rather than hidden behind a call.

What you cannot establish from the outside is whether the result is any good for the specific game you have in mind. Nothing written on a page settles that. Downloading it and spending an evening does.