The Defold engine seems very nice and I appreciate you releasing it, but it could definitely benefit from some productivity TLC.
The general theme of all of this is the tool is there to do the work, not the developer. The developer is there to provide the smarts, the tool is there to do the grunt work. Overall there seems to be a lot of go-here-do-this, go-there-do-that in the existing editor design (which is time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive for the game designer). The editor doesn’t provide any sort of guidance or workflow.
All of these comments came up while using version 2 of the editor but appear to apply to version 1 also.
Scripts on objects – instead of having users create a script then attach it to a game object, just have that automatically provided as an option at the game object level. I get you want re-use, but the handling is cumbersome. Scripts are the guts of the game – it should be right-click and type/use existing.
Default values – automatically provide reasonable default values if possible. For example, default the Text object to use the system font instead of throwing an error. The editor already knows about the font! It’s listed right there in the IDE!
Automatic creation of fonts – there’s no reason to have the developer specify font resolution. The compiler can determine what the developer needs at compile time, so it should just create the correct assets automatically.
Automatic creation of image atlas – likewise, the compiler has enough knowledge to automatically create texture atlases at compile time. I recognize that there is an edge condition where you would want to create an atlas for separate delivery but that should be a separate work flow. Again, the editor already knows!
Automatic creation of whatever – if the compiler can figure it out, let it. That’s its job. The days of programmers being able to write better optimized code than compilers ended 20 years ago.
Improve the GUI library – include nodes for the standard GUI widgets used in GUIs including text input, scroll panels, buttons (not just boxes), etc. There’s no reason that every developer that uses the tool should have to reinvent these. Every professional-level game has some sort of GUI, so making this as easy as possible would be a huge benefit to everyone. Yes, it might take a week of development time to add an QA a scroll panel. But it will also take 10000 other game developers a week to do it. Save them the time.
Drag-and-Drop – components don’t seem to allow drag-and-drop to add items to the hierarchy. Minor but kind of strange in a modern tool.
Debugging – I assume that debugger support is just not added yet.
Promotional environment – I assume that at some point in the future your company will develop some sort of app store in the same vein as Steam.
I realize that this is kind of nagging, but I think you have the core of something that could be great. I’d like to see it become a real leader in the market.