Game maker for schools: the deployment questions

Flockbay is a desktop application distributed as an installer for 64-bit Windows 11 and as an x86_64 AppImage for Linux. It is installed per machine. There is no web version, no managed browser deployment, and no thin client. A school running iPads cannot use it at all, and no amount of planning changes that. A school running Chromebooks can only on Intel or AMD models, and only once IT turns on their Linux environment.

On managed Windows fleets it is a normal application install and behaves like one. It ships with its own copy of Godot inside the bundle, so there is no second engine install to manage and no separate Godot version to keep in step across a lab.

Storage is local. Each project is an ordinary Godot project in a folder, which means it lives wherever the student profile lives. On roaming profiles or heavily quota-limited home drives, that is worth sizing before rollout rather than after.

Building requires an internet connection, and this is not a soft requirement with a degraded mode behind it. The chat, asset generation and world data all come over the network. If the connection is unavailable, students cannot build. They can still play what they have already built, because the game runs locally on the bundled Godot.

School networks are the specific risk here, because they are filtered, proxied and shared thirty ways at once. The honest advice is to trial it on one machine, on the actual school network, during a busy period, before committing a scheme of work to it. That single test tells you more than any specification sheet.

There is no offline mode. Saying otherwise would set a school up for a bad lesson.

This is the part that fits school procurement least well, because there is nothing to procure: no site licence, no seats and no volume arrangement. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key. Flockbay builds from a library of ready-made objects, or with Godot's own shapes.

In practice that means a school runs a cohort on the free app, on the free hosted AI each account gets every day, or connects its own AI for Flockbay: a ChatGPT sign-in, an API key, or its own agent over MCP. There is no purchase order and no contract. That is not the procurement shape schools normally expect.

Accounts are individual accounts. There is no admin console, no class roster and no centralised management of student accounts.

A subject that is usually gated behind programming becomes accessible to a whole cohort rather than the four students who were already writing code at home. Because Flockbay builds the world and writes the GDScript from a brief the student approves, then play-tests its own work, a student's work is design: what the brief asks for, how the systems should behave, and judgement after every play. Those are the parts of game development worth a term.

The output is a real Godot project, on open-source software, that the student owns and keeps. Nothing about the work is trapped in the app. A student who leaves the school, or leaves the tool, leaves with a project that still opens.

And the loop is fast enough to be taught in periods rather than in projects. A student plays, decides it is wrong, says why and plays the change inside one lesson, which is the thing that makes design teachable at all.