First, the core of Defold is great. The mission of Defold is great. Making games with Defold is still the best experience where it matters out of everything else I’ve used in the past.
There are things that do suck though, and I don’t think that they will be able to be addressed by the core Defold team, they will have to be addressed by capable outsiders.
The source-available license for Defold makes it difficult to have financial incentives for improving the Defold editor/engine as a game development tool. I think that to fix the issues Defold has the financial incentive is necessary.
So entirely new editors / tools need to be created which do not have the restrictions the main Defold code has.
This I feel aligns with many Defold devs moving to VS Code for the majority of development. The Defold code editor still sucks, still is missing so many quality of life features, still gets laggy when typing in large projects even on good computers. The people who put together the VS Code files are heroes who kept good devs within the Defold ecosystem, and made it less painful for new devs to use Defold to make games with. We need more of this!
I like the idea of Clojure, but I feel it was a mistake making the editor use that. Using JavaFX also feels like a mistake, it still apparently has upstream bugs that impact people to this day. When I pick a color on Windows, it still explodes!
The core of Defold is good, but it’s not approachable for new users for 3D at all. I don’t want to hear apologetics, every single person I have tried to convince to try using Defold for simple 3D projects got nowhere and resorted to using Unity instead. I don’t want to tell people to use Defold anymore, and that’s a problem.
Right now the main Defold editor is not friendly for making 3D games. Importing assets sucks, creating levels sucks. People such as @dlannan have made progress on making scripts which enable using Blender partially as a 3D editor. I would encourage @dlannan to commercialize this and sell it on Blender Market. Getting $50-100 sales for making certain things less painful can be good incentive to make it even better.
There has to be existing open-source editors out there that can be made to work with Defold’s formats relatively easily and then made into paid apps to give the maintainers a financial incentive to keep improving them.
Passion for the tools being good is also necessary besides financial incentive, the people making tools need to be able to understand the pain of using the current Defold editor, need to be willing to try Unity/Godot/Unreal and understand what is missing and how to make what will come next better.
Some 3D specific features to address:
- make asset importing easier, support import of more 3D formats, support them in ways that are obvious, fix the gotchas with importing models (there are many limitations right now that are not obvious) Consider how much easier it is to import models into Godot, Unity, or Unreal. Perhaps some kind of drag and drop tool where you can drag native blender files in and it automatically creates what Defold needs / guides you through some steps and asks you which models/whatever you want to use.
- get drag and drop into the editor working better, get drag and drop from the asset list to the viewport working, get asset import from file explorers to viewport working A paid viewport editor that also has the assets panels may be necessary. This could evolve into a full commercial replacement to the Defold editor as far as the viewport/project setup goes.
- redo viewport from scratch for 3d too, find someone capable of this who understands it, it’s not enough for someone to make issues because it’s not just a features thing it’s a feel thing and the person making the new viewport needs to care about it being good because they want to use it, editing 3d levels needs to be easy/convenient/intuitive/feel good to do ^ previous thing too, just need an entirely new viewport editor. Current editor isn’t perfect for 2D either. Where are the snapping tools?
- make a better 2d+3d camera module and make it built into Defold, integrate its features with the new viewport and camera component better this is something @ross.grams could work on, make Rendercam2 and make it $100, partner with whoever makes a better editor to have it be an addon for that thing, or be the person who makes the commercial editor too.
Soon people may be using a Wefold editor that uses bob.jar under the hood for bundling project files and VS Code for writing script without ever touching the current Defold Editor 2. Defold team can still continue work on improving the engine and core features that are still incredibly necessary, without having as much pressure to worry about making the editor good enough.
There is no good reason for Defold to not be as easy as other tools. It is unfortunate that Defold got kneecapped for its license and never got the kind of opensource frenzy of support that Godot and now Bevy get. To make Defold better now, I think it just needs cold hard capitalism. Make tools that make dev’s lives easier, and sell them. The stuff by https://www.codeandweb.com/ is a great example of this. While it would be better for Defold to have a polygon editor in the editor itself, I can live with using a great 3rd party option. Same goes for TexturePacker too. Even Unity/Unreal rely on thousands of developers who also have financial incentives through the Unity and Unreal asset stores to build better tools for things that suck in Unity/Unreal. We’ve been waiting forever for a functional editor extension system, but I don’t think we should wait. The person who makes the Wefold editor can make and profit from an asset store that allows other devs to build on that new editor and distribute assets through that editor instead. Defold is a great foundation that no one has capitalized on yet for this angle. Build on it and profit.
Staying within legal limits is important still too. As far as I know, it’s only using the existing code that’s problematic. You can’t commercially distribute Defold stuff with the software you sell… but you can make it easy to dynamically download bob.jar etc. from Github! Hopefully Sweden/King doesn’t try to stomp on anyone trying to make things better and get enough money for it to make sense to do.
I’m not saying I am going to do this stuff. I’m not the right person to! But this is a call to action for anyone out there who is reading this and capable of doing it… do it! If there are a few people interested in working on a commercial editor alternative, work together and make a new startup to do it. I will pay for what you make.
) would have by now existed, if there would be enough interest in Defold, I think. I would make myself at least a try at making an Editor for Defold in Qt or maybe PyGUI, or JS or as an PWA (so that’s an online tool/service?), you know, something that is popular (and simple) enough to interest those wanting to improve their skills, make portfolio and contribute.