Defold Popularity - Discussion

I think the showcase page needs a update as well. Gifs, videos and screenshots + short description then the store link. Something like the @britzl example page or itch.

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Agreed. There is already a great 2D lights sample by Bjorn. That could be isolated into a starter project of its own for those who need lighting solutions in their games

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Hereā€™s my first, reeeeally simple and quick video :sweat_smile:

Hereā€™s also a graphic I made for a new tutorial - you can also use it however you want :wink: (I can tweak texts)

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Nice initiative @Pawel
Iā€™ll share another idea that I had but now for the assets portal. I got lost using it when I was learning Defold. We always hear about the most used ones like monarch, orthogra camera, rich text, printer and so on but thereā€™s so many hidden gem.

Donā€™t get me wrong. The actual filtering options are excelent (category and the githubā€™s star count) but it can be improved to help beginners. So my idea is quite simple: make a filter based on common game genres and that will return a collection of assets. They will work as suggestions. For example Iā€™m making a rpg turn based game. If i go to the asset portal and filter that Iā€™ll get a collection of useful assets / extensions that I could use on my game like camera, rich text, quests, gui (sorry I just using generics here). Again, theyā€™re just suggestions of usefull tools that are already available for the users. This can be implemented in the templates example as well. The assets portal is part of the Defold and I see many people complaining on ā€œhow x or y should be built inā€ (not talking about what ppl saying here btw). Maybe using one of two in templates or videos about em should change that mentality.

But again, itā€™s just an idea. This thread is getting confusing. Where should I post these ideas? :smile:

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Letā€™s keep it here for now as it related to how to increase the popularity of Defold and how to onboard new users.

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Tutorials are greatā€¦ but if they are posted on hereā€¦ its likely that not many people will see it.

The best place for a tutorial is for sale on a website like Udemy where many thousands of developers walk past the shop window every dayā€¦

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Quick suggestion; adding 3. party tutorials to the playlist on Defoldā€™s youtube channel would be useful for newcomers.
Also, adding a link to the this playlist from Learn page would be helpful(called Video Tutorials?)

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Good suggestion!

Thanks. Weā€™re going to rethink the Learn section a bit to help new users get a good start.

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I was thinking of creating a series of written tutorials for Defold. I was wondering what content will you guys like to see in such tutorials??
Also, where would be a good place to publish those tutorials?

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We will happily publish them here on the official site, but someone mentioned Udemy as a good way to host tutorials.

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Maybe would be also good to post Nakama video integration tutorials like Godot has https://heroiclabs.com/videos/

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This is a very good idea, I was even mentioning it above! :smiley:

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Ops, sorry!:sweat_smile:

The more I think about it the more I think the Pico-8 community is a great target sector for Defold. To know Lua is already a requirement for Pico-8. If we could recreate things about pico-8 in Defold, we could really bring in interest. Ideally there was a Pico-8 to Defold converter, but I think that would be a huge undertaking to be honest.

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How popular is Pico-8? This is my first time hearing about it.

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Defold forum is friendly but lacks tutorials. Few newbies post questions on the forums. Most newbies donā€™t come to the forum. I need more tutorials for newbies.

Defold manual is friendly to users with experience in game development, but unfriendly to newbies who have just started developing games. I need a tutorial for beginners just new to game development.

So, for beginners in game development, it is better to start with a different game engine than Defold. However, the only tutorial for other game engine users is Defold for Flash users.

Defold development team would like to create a simple hyper-casual game and upload it to the Google Play Store and make the process a tutorial. And put the game on the showcase.

  • Defold for newbies in game development
  • Defold for Unity users
  • Defold for Love2D users
  • Defold for PICO-8 users
  • Creating a simple hyper-casual game and posting it on the Google Play Store
    (+Google Play Game Services, Google Admob)
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I remember @britzl making a sort of Pico-8 emulator in Defoldā€¦

@WhiteBoxDev very popular comparatively but a large part of it is very good coders enjoying doing demoscene type things in tight limitations againā€¦ https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pico-8&src=typed_query&f=live much more active than Defold related tags.

We can already make what Pico-8 does fully in Defold if we were motivated enough.

General Pico-8 outreach is a good idea, helping to make people consider Defold as a real option to use because it can do so much more while still being able to be a limited virtual console if you really wanted that. Just allowing external artwork, ad networks, IAP, easy mobile export is a big advantage.

A fully working Pico-8 -> Defold project converter would be a worthwhile community project. If it existed and was well supported many who made games in Pico-8 would be able to use it to ship games on say Nintendo Switch.

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Ah, yes, that was a really fun project. It only implements a subset of the Pico-8 API but Iā€™m 100% sure you can implement all of it with a little bit of effort.

That would be awesome and it would probably be a great incentive for Pico-8 devs to try Defold!

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Pico-8 while very niche also managed to capture the imaginations of many well established game developers. Thereā€™s something about working within the tight constraints of a platform that is quite refreshing today when often the only real constraints with mainstream game engines are ā€œyour imaginationā€ and budget.

Playdate is another project that really embraces platform (incl. hardware) constraints. A portable game console that somewhat resembles an early Game Boy, complete with a black and white screen and a hand-crank. Every Playdate is also a developer kit, with the SDK supporting both Lua and C. Again, a (yet to be released) niche product but one that has definitely captured the attention and imagination of many devs already. FYI many folks itching to begin developing for Playdate ahead of the official SDK becoming publicly available have resorted to using Lƶve2D to prototype their games, which according to various conversations on the Playdate Discord has a comparable model.

To me, Defold sits somewhere in-between purposely constrained platforms like Pico-8 and Playdate and ā€˜kitchen-sinkā€™ game engines such as Unity. I wonder if thereā€™s a way to embrace and highlight the constraints (2D focus, Lua, etc) of Defold as opportunities (aka: ā€˜me tooā€™), or as previously mentioned have Defold act as a means of quickly and easily bringing games built for these platforms to others (aka: porting)?

Or, perhaps a more interesting avenue is how might Defold ignite game designers (not just developers) imaginations in ways that other engines do not (aka: user preference and ā€˜go toā€™ tool/platform)?

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I agree a tutorial for a ā€œhypercasualā€ (whatever that really meansā€¦) would be good.
Hypercasual is all the hype now. And to my knowledge most of them are built with Unity (all the hypercasual publishers like Voodoo have their own analytics SDKā€¦built for Unity only).

I know I am interested in building hypercasual games with Defold :grinning:

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