We’ve put together a short questionnaire to learn more about what you like and dislike with Defold in its current state, and which platforms that are the most important to you. We would appreciate if you could take the time to fill out the survey:
Here’s how we plan to use the results:
We will promote the things you like about Defold when we talk about Defold and when we market Defold online.
We will dig into, and try to improve, on the things you do not like.
We will put extra effort and focus on the stability, performance and features of the platforms you care the most about.
What aspects of Defold do you like the most? Please choose your top five preferences from the following list:
There are things on this list that I would like the most, but I don’t think Defold has them or they’re not up to standards. Should I still select them?
At the time of writing, the Asset Portal contains 199 unique assets covering a wide range of features, from service integrations for analytics, monetization and social networks to game specific functionality such as achievements, quests and pathfinding. Many of the assets are officially supported and maintained by the Defold Foundation, while others are community created. Despite the relatively large choice of integrations we do acknowledge the fact that the Asset Portal doesn’t cover all popular service integrations and features. If you have specific requests for new assets, then please let us know on the Defold forum or on Discord!
I agree, there are some amazing extensions out there! The reason I chose this as an area for improvement is that for iOS and Android the native game services are incomplete, which can be an issue because virtually all games released on those platforms need to include those extensions.
This can lead to messy workarounds when using them together with other services, such as getting all the data to authenticate with Nakama:
This said, there are workarounds, and this isn’t a showstopper. Just thought I’d give my take on this: It’s not about the amount of extensions, but making sure the most important ones work well.
At first, thank you very much for sharing the results and your reaction!
“Things such as editing input bindings”
I have this issue now in my job, a combobox (Qt thing) is an enormously long list of fields to choose from and users scroll a lot of time just to get input. We solve it with search functionality - you start to type there and filtered out fields are only visible. For Input Bindings in Defold - I see no reason why we just couldn’t use the key on keyboard or mouse or pad to select it as trigger, by simply clicking given input, what do you think? Still leaving possibility to choose from the list, e.g. when given pad is not connected.
" Too frequent releases"
I rather love frequent releases and am agreeing with you on its benefits - especially incredibely fast bug solving. This is something that differentiates Defold on top of other engines imho and maybe it should just be more emphasized?
" Cross platform support is not good enough"
I didn’t marked it, it’s too generic and I don’t know what the “support” mean here.
But I would tick it, if it was more directly about support/help/guidance/learning resources for developing (and releasing) for multiple platforms is rather scarce or sketchy/cursory. I have an impression that before you try to release on different platform it’s really hard to start, but after it gets very easy. There is this gap, where when I ask persons who releases on, be it Android, iOS or Switch (I mean especially releasing on paid stores) - I have always answers noting it’s veery easy and there is nothing to explain, except few good advises to bear in mind. I don’t know though how to fill this gap, because I didn’t released a game on paid stores. That’s my impression as a person who only released on HTML5/PC on itch or similar, as many buddying indie devs.
It would be good to clearly show the status of each asset on the asset portal. Such as: released, tested (with with which release of Defold), being withdrawn, recommended, experimental,usage in high profile games. Basic information that can be added to the asset portal and be easy to keep up-to-date (low overhead to maintain).
