My regards to the Defold team! I’m excited to see what you guys have in store for us in the future. Vulkan and metal support sounds too good to be true. I’ve used and tried a lot of different engines by now but always end up coming back to Defold. Has the best balance of a good community, productivity, stability, being very lean, complete documentation and a lot of no frills/hassle free bonuses like it’s seamless packaging/deployment. It’s really amazing how much and how well you guys communicate with the rest of the community.
Personally really only one feature I want myself, and that’s Opus audio support. Seeing as how Defold already supports xiph.org’s vorbis audio format I wonder how much effort it would be to add support for xiph.org’s Opus audio format. It’s pretty much better than Vorbis every way and would overall be a nice upgrade to Defold. http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/
On another note for tutorials, I actually didn’t even think of this suggestion till recently after suggesting Defold to someone on reddit (original post here) who replied with:
I tried defold, but I guess i wasnt a fan because of the lack of great documentation. There just weren’t any good tutorials for beginners that I could find, at least not any that had the syntax explained well
I found this a bit ironic because out of all the engines and frameworks I’ve used this is one of the most well documented ones. On top of that there are good streamlined and complete tutorials but what I think is missing are short and partial tutorials that show you how to do very specific things quickly instead of having to retrace steps of how a tutorial game was made. I’ll give quick examples off the top of my head (so they might be bad but hopefully Im able to communicate the gist of what Im trying to say), something like “How to set the camera to top down”, very simple right? Maybe other things like “How to make a simple level up system” or “How to make a simple gun, ammunition system, and bullets”, etc. It would make it a lot easier for newcomers to just jump and learn the tidbits they want on the fly as they work on their own projects and intermediate users to build on their current knowledge. Tutorials like this are a lot easier to make I think and also teach a lot more “hands on” than having them just retrace steps of already made tutorial games.
I think a fragmented tutorial structure split and broken down into simpler tidbits make it easier for both new users to pick up, and more advanced users to build on what they already know with the things they’d specifically liked to learn one piece at a time. Tagging @Axel and @sicher here since we had discussed tutorials and how they can be improved in the past here. Just my two cents, I believe you guys will keep taking Defold in a good direction regardless.
Editing to add another feature that I think could be interesting. A template wizard to help get parts of your project started quickly. I got this idea from a scripted installer by the name of inno setup that has a script wizard that takes you through a couple forms and options to get the barebones setup, essentially making a template script for you. Something like this could be potentially attractive to others for a number of reason, like faster prototyping, and for newer users it would help them jump into things more quickly by introducing them to different parts of the engine (through the wizard) then getting them started on top of teaching some of the basic structure, configurables, etc . I know the engine is meant to be kept as minimal as possible and might not need bells or whistles like a quick start wizard but it could make for an interesting addition down the road.