An FPS maker that runs the shooter on your own machine
By Eduardo Orellana · Updated
Flockbay is free on your own Claude or ChatGPT plan. Claude Pro or Max, or ChatGPT Plus or higher, builds a real Godot project in the Godot editor. Claude Free and ChatGPT Free do not run here. More models are optional, a credit reload at API prices. Windows today. The engine is the official Godot release. Shooters are the genre where the hardware you are running on shows up in the game. Flockbay is a desktop app and your shooter runs locally, which is why the levels do not have to be small.
Why the shooter runs locally, and why that decides things
Flockbay is a desktop app for Windows with a copy of Godot inside it. Pressing play runs your shooter on your own machine, at your machine framerate, using your machine memory and graphics card.
Browser-based makers cannot do this, and the consequence is not abstract. It is why their example projects are small, why the draw distance is short, why there are rarely more than a handful of active enemies, and why the lighting is baked flat. A tab is a budget.
If what you want is a shooter with a long sightline, a real skybox, dynamic shadows and twenty things happening at once, running locally is not a preference. It is the requirement.
The build loop
You build the level directly. Terrain, buildings, cover, props, light. It is a level editor, so you are looking at the thing you are changing rather than describing it and waiting.
Flockbay writes the code: the controller, weapons, damage, enemy behaviour, objectives, the pause menu, the save. GDScript, inside your project, where you can see it. You describe what should happen and then check by playing.
The check is the important half. Play the level, notice you always approach from the left, and go move something. Nobody can tell you that from a description and no generator can predict it.
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You are the one who says it is wrong
The app assumes you bring your own Claude or ChatGPT plan. It does not assume you cannot tell a bad shooter from a good one. Those are different things and most tools in this space confuse them.
So the loop is: describe, play, disagree, describe again. Handing work back because the recoil is too heavy is the normal state of the project, not a fault in the process.
What you will not do is spend the first two weeks getting a character controller to stop clipping through walls before anything is fun.
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Practical answers
It is a download and an install, on Windows, and both platforms ship. The project it produces is a real Godot project, so it is not locked to this app.
Building needs an internet connection, because the chat, asset generation and world data come over the network. The finished game runs without one.
The download is free and the world builder is free to use. 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. Nothing about the engine or the size of your level changes.
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What a local build lets you attempt
Long sightlines with things worth seeing at the end of them. Dynamic shadows that move. A skybox and weather that change the read of a level between the start and the end. Twenty enemies active rather than five.
None of those are exotic. They are ordinary shooter features that a constrained runtime makes into a fight, and running on your own hardware makes into a default.
It also means your performance testing is real. What you see when you press play is what someone on a similar machine will see, rather than a number filtered through a shared server and a browser tab.
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Performance is a design tool
Because you are testing on your own hardware, you find out early what your level can afford, and that is useful information rather than bad news.
Knowing you have headroom lets you commit to a long sightline or a heavier lighting setup. Knowing you do not lets you design around it while the level is still cheap to change.
Either way it is a real measurement of the machine your player will use, taken during the work rather than at the end. That is not something a shared or browser runtime can give you honestly.
A starting project for this is the shooter game templates. The design note that goes with it is the four Ps of Doom’s combat.
Questions
- How big can a level be?
- Large enough that your machine is the limit rather than the tool. Running locally on bundled Godot is what makes that true.
- Can I import my own models?
- Yes. Your own files, web sources and generated assets all sit in the same Godot project.
- Does it work on Mac?
- Yes. Windows both ship.
- Is there a browser version?
- No. It is a desktop app, deliberately, because a shooter is the genre a browser handles worst.
- Is there a paid plan?
- 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.
- Can I test performance properly?
- Yes, because you are running on your own hardware rather than a shared runtime. What you see when you press play is what a player on a similar machine sees.
Related
Free to download for Windows. Your machine runs the shooter.
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