When I’ll wrap my mind around Defold, I’m gonna make some tuts on how to move from GM:S to Defold.
I do believe Defold gonna attract huge part of GM:S community, so it’ll be handy for newcomers.
Meanwhile, - is there anyone here who’s already doing some progress on learning Defold, and have GM:S background?
More tutorials sounds great!
I don’t think anyone has done any GM->Defold tutorials as of yet, but I know people would really appreciate it. Been trying to convince my brother, who just started learning GM, to give Defold a try; he would definitely like something like that.
Give him some time to get his hands dirty. GM is really cool engine, it allows you to hack your way through, making some pretty games very fast.
But I would advice to move on to Defold after covering some basics with GM. I myself struggling two days already, to get used to Defold’s rules and “keep your stuff organized” order. It’s really hard to move away from “I’ll just put it here, and it will work” way of thinking, after 2+ years of using GM 
There really is no strict need for you to organise your files in folders and all that. You can put all files in the root folder of your project and still make it work. It will be messy but it will work. And at any time you can create folders and reorganise your project. As long as you have sprites and other things pointing to the correct files the editor itself will make sure to update all relationships when you reorganise things by drag and drop in the Project Explorer tab in the editor.
Well, yeah, exactly!
Pro’s of GM - it’s “hack-y”. You click “NewSprite”, you upload you image sequence. You click “NewObject”, you pick your new animation from the list, - and you place your brand new wall, or tree, or fire, in the game. It’s done. You can build your whole level in several minutes, it’s very intuitive and very straight.
No need to struggle with collections, organize your files or dig through settings. Just bring your stuff and place it on screen.
Cons of GM - it’s not really suitable for organized and long work. Sooner or later lack of organisation can (and will) bring snowballing mess.
So, from my point of view - that’s a struggle to get used to new tools and order, but that’s a good thing. Personally, that’s what I was looking for.
I started out with Game Maker myself, but that was 16 years ago haha. I’ll try get some time to refresh my memory and then maybe do something with it. What I personally like a lot about it was the “all in one solution” that you could edit your sprites and create animations within the editor itself, import and export sprite-sheets etc. Especially the fact you could draw “transparent areas” defined by the corner color
Now I’m necro-posting but I thought it would be worth adding the result of this here.
This is by no means a tutorial on how to transition from Game Maker to Defold, but if you like “code-blocks” functionality of Game Maker, here’s a way to achieve something similar in Defold: DefKit - Component based Scripts for “Visual Scripting”