I’d like to see some examples of tutorials from other engines to better understand the level we need to meet in terms of being beginner friendly. Could someone please share examples of tutorials you think are perfect for beginners?
We’ve made a first tweak to the landing page of the Learn section. Videos and Tutorials are now featured more prominently:
I think the Junior Programmer pathway on Unity Learn is as close as you can get to a “perfect” beginner tutorial.
In my opinion, what helped me the most as a beginner 3 years ago were well made video tutorials with step by step instructions.
I also really enjoy tutorials with frequent “challenges”, because they help me stay focused on the tutorial content and apply my knowledge, instead of zoning out. A “challenge” is a section of a video where the teacher tells the viewer to pause and complete a small coding challenge involving something that was taught during the video.
For example, maybe the video is teaching how to send messages between objects, there could be a challenge that prompts the user to send a message to an object before the teacher does it.
Lex 100% agree… hypercasual and these io (multi player) games are where it is at with HTML games.
I was going to make one of these but when I looked into the Colyseus examples at the weekend… they didnt work… and I dont have a tonne of time to look at the code… its big turn off anyway when your first introduction to a product is that the examples are buggy. I would like to see some decent but basic template defold game demos that work for some of these servers Colyseus and Nakama… 
Did you see this blog post about Nakama and Defold?
I looked at both the Nakama and Colyseus…
For the Nakama … I kind of dismissed out of hand after seeing their $600 a month starter kit… Thats not the sort of budget for a hobbyist… Makes no sense to me when a minecraft server is $10 a month… they should have an option for real beginners… They can stack a load of VM machines from people with small games into one real server. Yup I know I could setup my own server…
For the Colyseus… I see you have mentioned something about a fix in another thread… I will take a look indeed. . Thankyou 
I had a look at this and I agree, it is very very impressive. The production quality and the whole structure of the tutorial with the pathways, missions, briefings etc is super-professional. Reaching that kind of quality is out of reach to all games engines but Unity (and maybe also Unreal, but I doubt even that).
The length is also out of this world. The Junior Programmer pathway consists of 4 missions. The first mission has 13 hours and 20 minutes worth of videos!!! The second mission has about 25 hours of videos. Mission three has about 10 hours of videos and finally mission 4 with 5 hours. A total of more than 50 hours of videos!
This is obviously fantastic but imagine the production cost! We are without a doubt looking at costs probably in the range of $300k.
And for someone deciding to go through with the Junior Programmer pathway it is a significant investment in time as well. It should be treated more like “I’m talking a course in programming” than “I’m gonna watch a video on how to become a game developer”.
The videos can obviously be consumed one at a time and based on your current needs so you don’t have to watch all of the 50 hours from start to finish of course.
I feel that I’m complaining, but really I’m not 
I’m very impressed, but I’m also realistic and well aware of the fact that Defold will not be able to offer this kind amount of tutorials with that quality. We will instead have to make incremental improvements and focus on where it is most needed.
Oh absolutely, I meant to point out the first mission rather than the whole thing. 
That pathway definitely should be treated like a course rather than a tutorial series. For Defold I would expect something a lot shorter, something to help beginners get their feet wet.
Re “$600”, @britzl answered somethin (short) here:
But I wonder if there’s some way Nakama could make the cost clearer somehow?
What do you think @britzl?
You can spin up a Nakama instance very easily using Docker and a cheap $5 AWS instance.
Cost is not an issue with Nakama.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_by_step/your_first_game.html
Most of the Defold tutorial games don’t start at zero. It loads a template that has already been completed to some extent and only makes minor modifications.
Like the tutorial on the link, I need a tutorial that starts at zero and builds a simple hyper-casual game. And in order to take advantage of the Defold, the tutorial should be in the process of releasing the game in HTML5. In addition, I hope that the tutorial will cover Google Play Services and Admob until it is released on the Play Store.
And I want the completed tutorial to stand out before other tutorials.
How current/valid are those videos? Can one still watch them and follow along in current versions?
I’d say that all of them are relevant. We very rarely introduce breaking changes. You should be able to use anything you see in the videos in the latest version of Defold.
Also relevant comparison.
Comparing Defold with other game engines that use Lua:
Youtube:(it is the worlds second biggest search engine after all)
Note that there are more searches for “2d game engine” on Youtube (comparing with Google web search).
Suggestion to make Defold trendy:
implement a module to integrate Defold with Metamask (or any other popular crypto wallet).
Make it easy for developers to develop blockchain-based games (see AxieInfinity for example).
Without a proper extension for it, you should be able to use https://github.com/AGulev/jstodef/ and adapt one of the JS guides out there.
https://medium.com/tomochain/building-your-first-game-dapp-on-tomochain-part-1-b033cdeaa25c
https://medium.com/tomochain/building-your-first-game-dapp-on-tomochain-part-2-ea0740c79569
AxieInfinity
This one is more complicated than “DApps”?
I didn’t know about that extension, very nice. I thought we only had the html.run() technique.
What could be useful would be an Android extension as well to sign messages with the Metamask/other wallet apps. I thought about creating it at some point but I don’t have time right now…
Google summer of code which is currently going on could also be a nice yearly influx of users eager to contribute.
I’ve been programming for over 20 years and did a significant amount of coding on CoronaSDK. I chose CoronaSDK primarily because of the ease of starting (which was largely about the widget library) and the pure 2D focus. I have spent a couple weeks trying to get rudimentary things going in Defold beyond the (repetitive) Youtube tutorials, which all seem to work in the individual template projects. Once I step outside of that or try to constrain elements of the project, things happen that make no sense to me. I’m known for being stubborn, but at this point, if there’s no other resource than to post on a forum than figure out the commonality between a couple tiny codebases, I have to give up because it’s only going to get harder.
The moment I realized Defold didn’t even have a scroll pane GO or how weird the GUI builder was, I went straight to Godot for a day. Godot suffers from its own problems, but I’m going to use it (or Unity) because I can actually save time building things. Sure, it’s great that Defold is very “bare bones”…but that’s not what developers need. They need the engine to save them time and effort or it’s just in the way. Defold feels like it’s always in the way…like I can’t open another project from the IDE without opening another instance. No searching inside the IDE GUI (game.project) file? (Edit: Ah, there is a filter, just not in focus or a way to tab into it). Defold doesn’t just seem basic, it seems primitive.
The language doesn’t matter. Learning LUA or GDScript or C# is inconsequential compared to the time it takes to make a custom UI widget look and behavior just right. LUA is great, insofar as most developers will find it’s a simpler version of Javascript. The lack of a package manager for LUA has hurt it for a long time, but ok. So where’s the tutorial on how to hook in C to expand the capabilities of LUA in Defold?
Writing this made me realize just how unhappy I am with Defold as a choice. It’s too much work to figure out how to manipulate the game elements by specifying the right values to tweak in the right variables with the right names. Other engines give me those values as fields in a UI because of course you want to be able to alter the Viewport size. I don’t know who Defold is for, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a hobbyist right now.
Thank you for your honest feedback. Defold is indeed bare bones in some respects compared to other engines. I have a few questions that I’d appreciate if you could answer though:
What do you mean by this? You can search in the game project file through the drop down selector in the top right corner of the game project editor.
We do not have a tutorial but we do have a manual and template project: https://defold.com/manuals/extensions/. Did you find it?
Could you please elaborate on this?
Perhaps my personal comments on this. I am both a Godot and Defold hobbyist. I have attempted a number of experiments on both and to be honest I tend to believe my opinion might help in this discussion because I personally may not like or dislike any of them over the other. But generally:
I think the developer experience on Godot is amazing. And that is what it thrives at. I remember I started learning both Godot and Defold at the same time, and to be honest it took me a lot less time to get oriented to very powerful capabilities on Godot - it was quite a hassle getting oriented to how Defold works.
But what impresses me with Defold is just how amazingly optimized it is overall, and just how seemless it is to build your games, even with Native Extensions embedded. Its component system (game object / collection / asset management) is also quite amazing and very well organized.
Now, I am not saying I like Godot over Defold, but I think this feedback may be important in understanding how and why Godot does get a lot of traction going for it. There is a place and time for each of these engines, depending on what you want and what your priorities are. Personally, I have done a lot more experiments on Godot than I have on Defold simply because it takes me more time to do something similar to Godot on Defold.
I believe personally, each company or individual can decide what their priorities are and how much effort they are willing to put in. And depending on their choice, they can capitalize on the strengths of each of these tools - in a way that serves their needs best.
I have also been thinking about setting up a Defold community locally. I know I am procrastinating on this but I guess its about time 
. I do love Defold alot. And I think this feedback on my side may be useful for additional context.
