“Not even TikTok”, as if that is the bare minimum? 
Does Unity have a TikTok?
I can get on board with targeting some social media platforms (e.g. Twitter and YouTube), but I don’t really see the point in the Defold team allocating resources to TikTok/Snapchat/Instagram/etc. That just doesn’t seem serious, and seems like a waste of time.
Defold does rely a lot on community support, so if you think evangelising on TikTok is a good idea then you should do so!
You have to realise that Defold is developed by a 6 man team and funded through partnerships and donations. We are not 2000 people like Unity and we are not making a ton of money on our own ad network like Unity does.
Creating videos is expensive. We can support community initiatives such as Unfolding Gamedev (by @Pawel), but we can’t pay for a full time person creating videos.
Correct. We do not have Ticktok. We do not even have a social media manager. We primarily use the social media channels we are active in ourselves, and yes, we are probably too old for Ticktok 
If it is any consolation the 6 man team working on Defold has around 100 years of collective experience working on games and game engines. It will to some extent guarantee that we know what we are doing while we create one of the best cross platform game engines on the planet. But it may also result in missed opportunities on new social media platforms.
More people != More money
More people == More questions and more support required
Don’t get me wrong. We want more developers. But we also need professional game developers that can ship games. Shipped games is great marketing and it will help us attract corporate partners that have money.
“2000” isn’t enough. It’s close to 8000 employees. And we’re not even 8 ^^
Honestly, the small and super friendly community of Defold is one of it’s great bonus strengths. Focusing on helping serious devs ship games is such a wise paradigm, IMO. Keeps things optimized and lightweight, just like the engine.
In contrast, looking at something like Godot, their Discord and forum are inundated with the same questions over and over again from what I call ‘game tourists’ which makes communication with the actual engine devs very reduced 
(Whereas in Defold the engine devs answer questions and discuss concepts with game devs using Defold with a very impressive regularity!)
Agree. The community is awesome! 
I hope this doesn’t change as the engine becomes more popular.
TikTok & Instagram are good for game developers to promote their games but for an engine YouTube & Twitter are more than enough. Maybe an official Discord, but the rest require too much effort for almost nothing in return.
The audience on those platforms are the ADD type with short attention spans looking to be entertained 10 seconds at a time.
Dear god. I’m old. I can’t even get the spelling right for those fancy new platforms kids are using… 
I use TikTok as well 
I was comparing and testing Godot and Defold 6 months ago, when searching for long-term development tool for multmedia apps like interactive kiosk apps and games and choose Defold instead of Godot because of community and being lightweight.
Defold seems very hard to learn for newcomers but once You learn how to use it, its great. Most people expect bunch of samples already available for them to try once they first open editor. Being difficult at first, thats actually Defolds greatest strength, you get blank canvas for game and its up to you to organize whole project from start to finish. This could change in future
Godot seems cool at first, with all those features out-of-the-box so its the main reason many people jump to Godot when they were first find it on internet, however when digging deeper, there are alot of bloated features, build size is too large, 3D performance is horrible and I despise their cartoonish robot logo and name (looks childish and unprofessional for engine which claims to be No.1 open source game engine).
I will toss in my 2 cents on this. I was recently searching for game engines. The articles that would pop up always mentioned Godot along with Unity. I’m not sure where I heard about Defold. Personally I do not care about 3d at all, so Defold being 2d focused was a plus to me. But Godot does 2d fine as well. The thing that really got me interested in Defold was the console support. My games will be desktop first, and then my dream is to later release them on consoles. Free support for Switch is HUGE to me. With Unity you have to have Unity Pro which is over 2k a year and with Godot, practically speaking, you are probably going to pay a third party company to port your game, also costing you thousands of dollars and you have to now rely on this arrangement and relationship with this other company. I think this should be shouted from the rooftops when talking about Defold. It is a massive selling point!!!
That is why I like Defold compared to Godot. The problem I see is that if you search for tutorials on Youtube, you will find tons of people making Godot content and not much at all for Defold, which is pretty bad for appealing to new people. Also, there are a lot of courses for Godot on Udemy, and that is how I learned Unity before, through courses I bought there, but there aren’t any Defold courses there. The two Udemy courses I checked out for Godot were both great, and one of them is exceptional quality. It’s just my 2 cents but this is something that matters to me. I would love a Defold course of the same quality as that one.
I will say though that I did not get discouraged too much by this and found the learning materials on this site are pretty good. But I still didn’t think there was enough. Though earlier today I found the public examples on the britzl github, which was like finding a chest of treasure. I already saw many examples there of things I was wondering how I could accomplish them with Defold. And the forums here are really active, so I think people can actually get all the help they need if they go with Defold.
Yes, this is definitely a great advantage with Defold. During the recent Unity troubles with their Runtime Fee a lot of users discovered Defold for the first time and many were really positive when they saw that console access was free. I do not know how to advertise it though? How and where should we promote it?
True. I think the main reason is that the Defold user base is much smaller than Unity, and also smaller than Godot. People making these courses are investing A LOT of hours into the courses and they want a return on their investment. If the market is small then they simply wont do it. The Defold Foundation do not have the capacity to produce hours upon hours of video courses, but we would be willing to fund this if someone is willing to put in the hours.
If Defold wants some kind of official TikTok but doesn’t have the internal team resources to do it, maybe I can do it, as I am probably the youngest person on this thread (Not to dox myself but I am 18), and I could probably help to make Defold known to the younger cohort of the gamedev online community on TikTok.
Speaking with my youngian street knowledge, this is only half true, mostly because the heavy majority (depending on the location, somewhere from 30% in more impoverished and rural communities to as high as 90% in some urban communities, but overall above 60% of the generation) of young people use TikTok. I believe there has been research showing that TikTok, social media, and other things have shortened attention spans, but this is more so generational (unfortunately) than temporarily corrupting some portion of the general population.
I understand the concern but as perhaps one of the youngest people in the Defold community, I would hate to see Defold become hostile to young people because of some stereotype about attention spans. When I was young, I discovered Defold 4 years ago after a lot of research, and Defold was the only game engine I could use because of the simplicity and I didn’t have very much formal CS education. Defold was my way into gamedev.
As much as I love how small and kind the Defold community is, I think there are lots of people who would like Defold if they learned about it.
To increase awareness of the engine and its advantages, I would consider more targeted events and activities rather than setting up and maintain a YouTube or TikTok presence. Personally, I barely take part in the gamedev community, so I don’t know what the best avenues would be. But…
I would image that an AMA on a gamdev sub-Reddit could work decently well, assuming it’s framed as not only promoting Defold (since people are likely to react negatively to marketing) but also why are we making it, what are the interesting challenges in developing and maintaining it, what have we learned about community building etc.
Gamedev discord servers may also serve as a similar venue for an AMA-style event. I’m on the How To Market a Game server, where after the Unity backlash there’s a temporary channel for discussing engines; it’s probably not the place to evangelize, but you get the idea.
That is definitely not something we want. We have actively been working with game dev schools in Sweden in various ways over the years and while it is hard to measure if it has had any real impact, it was a very rewarding experience nonetheless.
Maybe we could do this. Any recommendation on sub-Reddit?
We’re present in a number of places outside of this forum and Discord:
Any recommendation on sub-Reddit?
I’m afraid not. Maybe someone here in the community knows Reddit and can suggest any suitable sub.
Discord
I saw that Games From Scratch has a “gamedev-discords” channel with links, e.g. like the one below. Hard to say which ones would be open to and good for hosting a QnA.
I participated in a Discord QnA for a game I worked on. Our community manager had a Discord bot (?) that made the process rather easy, so we didn’t miss any questions and didn’t end up with multiple people trying to answer the same question at the same time.
For us it was a 90 minutes commitment (more for the community manager though), and I think that’s maybe at a good level to keep it at so that it doesn’t become a time-sink.
@britzl (or anyone else also for that matter) Is there a list or something available of tutorials/content that need producing? I am fairly new to Defold but keen on contributing (especially after the Unity debacle). I was considering making time to help out on some tutorials as I also learn the system. My daughter is a motion designer and video editor and can contribute towards editing the videos etc. as needed to add to her portfolio. ie. 2 pairs of hands willing and able to help. Just point us in direction of where to start first
Welcome, and thanks so much for offering to do this!
I’m sure others have more specific suggestions, but one thing I have seen a lot is requests for tutorials that start from scratch. People seem to be really keen to follow along from the very beginning. That would be one aspect to consider, I think.
Thank you so much for offering to help out!
I think this answers at least what to begin with: A starter tutorial where you start with an empty Defold project and build up to something simple. It could initially be as easy:
Something like the above could be the bare minimum getting started tutorial. This could then be expanded into something more game like. Shoot bullets, Move enemies, Collisions etc
A question that comes up from time to time is how to handle different aspect ratios, screen resolutions and physical display sizes. The answer is different for different types of games, and it involves the GO world, GUIs, display profiles, and the render script. Thus, it can be hard to fully understand how it all fits together and how to set it up for your specific game and target platforms.
It’s a pretty specific topic, and probably something for later once you have tackled a handful of the more fundamental topics.