Bringing my game, Maze of Thorns, to Defold!

Dev diaries
1

Hey there!

I am a new Defold member and I just wanted to introduce myself.

My name is Joe, and my indie game studio is called Fire Maple Games. I have been making point and click adventure games for mobile devices since 2009.

My latest game, Maze of Thorns, was released a few weeks ago. It’s actually doing really well in Sweden at the moment - it’s currently the #10 overall paid game in Sweden on iOS. It’s been fluctuating around in the top ten since its release, which I am super proud of. :slight_smile:

I have been a Solar2D (formerly Corona) developer since 2009, and a Flash dev before that. I went to art school and studied fine art and illustration and taught myself programming over the years.

Like Defold, Solar2D is also a lightweight, performant free game engine whose coding language is Lua.

I’ve dabbled with Defold over the years, but I am so stuck in my Solar2D ways, that it is hard to jump ship.

Solar2D builds for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, tvOS, Steam, and Nintendo Switch. But its Linux target has been in development limbo forever, and they probably won’t target PlayStation or Xbox.

I am jealous of the PlayStation and Linux build targets in Defold! :slight_smile:

So as an experiment, over the past few days, I had chatGPT Astra write me a compatibility layer between Defold and my games.

Essentially recreating all of the Solar2D APIs that I use in my games to work with Defold’s APIs.

I didn’t want to rewrite the games in Defold and have to maintain two codebases with updates, bug fixes, etc.

My Maze of Thorns game folder is pretty big - it has like 4500 assets between all the lua files, graphics, sfx, music etc.

And I now have my Solar2D game folder working perfectly in Defold!

I know it’s cheating, but It’s so freaking cool.

Anyway, I will try and be a responsive and good forum member!
I am excited to be a new Defold community member - if in a slightly weird way :slight_smile:
Joe

10 Likes
2

Congrats! That is a great achievement!

I would not say it’s cheating. Doing this kind of translate from X to Y is a perfect example of where the use of an LLM can really speed up a very boring process. If you were to create the Solar2D to Defold compatibility layer as a way of learning Defold that would be one reason to do it manually, but since you have “dabbled with Defold over the years” that’s not really necessary.

Is your plan to migrate all of your games to Defold this way?

You are most welcome!