PC game maker for people who bring their own Claude or ChatGPT plan

A lot of game-making tools started as web products and later shipped something that wraps the website in a desktop frame. You can usually tell. The window resizes oddly, the file dialogs are not the ones your operating system uses, and performance never quite matches what the machine should manage.

Flockbay is a native desktop application for Windows, Linux and macOS. Godot ships inside it, so pressing play launches the game on your own hardware. Your graphics card draws the frames. Your memory holds the world. Nothing is streamed and there is no browser anywhere in the path.

Windows gets each release first, Linux runs the same app as an AppImage, and the Mac build is an earlier release.

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PC is the platform with the most headroom and the fewest gatekeepers. You can target a keyboard and mouse, assume a big screen, expect long sessions, and spend a frame budget that a phone or a browser tab does not have.

That changes what is reasonable to build. Terrain you can walk across for ten minutes. Weather that rolls in. A town with people in it doing things. Those are ordinary PC game features and they are hard-to-impossible in a tab.

It would be easy to read that as a case for three dimensions, and the PC library keeps refusing to cooperate. Stardew Valley in 2016 and Hollow Knight in 2017 are sprites, and neither is a smaller version of anything. A flat game spends the headroom differently — a few hundred hand-placed screens, a lot of things moving at once, a window you leave open all evening — but it spends it.

It also means you can ship without asking permission. A PC build is a folder you can hand to someone. Store distribution is its own process with its own requirements, but nothing stops you sending a friend a build tonight.

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The world is yours to build by hand, and making a project settles which kind of world it is: 2D or 3D, with the answer read from your description of the game, and nothing created until you confirm it. PC is the platform where that question carries the most weight, because a flat game has exactly as much standing on it as an open one.

In 3D you shape terrain, place water, set weather, and put buildings and characters where you want them. In 2D you drag ground onto the grid — the tiles, the edges and the collision all fall out of which cells you covered — and arrange sprites at an exact position, turn and size. Manual controls, mouse, direct, in a builder that behaves like a level editor either way.

Flockbay writes the code. Describe what should happen — the door needs a key, the enemy patrols until it hears you, the save should carry your inventory — and the GDScript lands in your project. You are not asked to read it, though it is right there and readable if you are curious.

Then you play it and say what is wrong. That is the loop. You supply the judgement; the code is somebody else's typing.

A Godot project on your disk. Godot is open source and free, so the project is not hostage to this app. If you stopped using the app tomorrow, the project still opens in Godot.

That matters for a PC game more than for a throwaway prototype, because PC games have long lives and you may want to come back to it in two years.

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Windows or macOS. Enough machine to render what you are building, since the rendering happens locally — a modest laptop for a modest world, real hardware for an open one.

An internet connection while building, because the chat, asset generation and world data all come over the network. Playing the game needs nothing.

Free to download, and the builder is free. Flockbay is free on your own AI: 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.

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Windows is the reference platform: each release is built and published there first. Linux gets the same app as an x86_64 AppImage for Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 39 or newer. The Mac build, for Apple Silicon, is an earlier release: it does not yet run Claude in the app or host the full editor.

That order is deliberate. One platform carries each new version first, and the others follow from the same code rather than from a separate port, so a feature reaches Linux and the Mac later rather than differently.

Practically, it means you can build on whatever you own, and moving a project between your own machines is a matter of moving a folder.