Yeah, I’ve been kind of dodging the @Oleg_The_Evangelist invites so far until the state of the native extensions is even more robust, but I can promise you we’ll add more documentation and some video content for you.
The bigger question though, what actual things do you want explained in more detail? What parts trip you up the most? It really helps us get the things sorted in a prio-first order 
coming after you and @inactive-vilse soon!
For native extensions I guess a good start would be to just explain once again how it works in practice and what are the nearest plans.
For the profiler video, folks say they just don’t understand the data it provides. So fir the first video, we can just walk through labels and perhaps, outline a few good practices for using all the profiler. Or the profilers 
I did a little experiment here - straight camera angle and a bit increased “production value” with a 15 sec intro music and an outro. Is it better like this, or shall we revert?
P.S.
Live Update 2 kind of finishes the Live Update topic for now. Hope you enjoyed it.
It’s been silent for a while since I’ve been both hands on two things.
Basically it is a take on casual tutorials genre. In this 27-minute video (I spoiled the last 8 minutes, hence 27 not 35) I am just building a small platformer from the scratch while poking many essential and advanced Defold features.
As always, your opinion is of much value.
hope you missed us
two new videos are coming: profiler demo and an insight into Defold related code samples on github.
time for another here-we-go on a quite an unexpected topic…how to use github
There’s a treasure trove of great assets, extensions, libraries and code samples on the Asset Portal, official Defold GitHub and many individual GitHub accounts.
In this video we’re thinking aloud of how to
- better navigate through all that
- get help and support
- contribute back
Asset Portal: https://www.defold.com/community/assets/
Defold GitHub: https://github.com/defold
All Defold tagged repos: https://github.com/topics/defold
All Defold-library repos: https://github.com/topics/defold-library
Here-we-go. Any requests for the next video?
We’re discussing roadmap priorities for Defold Editor team and their workflow with Erik Angelin. We think aloud of best ways to inspire the editor team implement your feature requests fast or to complain about bugs or annoyances.
And then we talk about the perspectives of editor extensions.
I think what Defold is missing is a large community resource to pull from.
You’ve all done a great job at beginner tutorials that can be completed in an hour or less and are very limited in scope. But because there’s a very small community for Defold there’s not really any significant resources past the basics.
I’m enjoying Defold so far and I think it’s great for prototyping small projects but I’d be apprehensive to use it for larger projects compared to say Unity simply because it has a wealth of tutorials, resources, examples, the marketplace etc to draw from even when I much prefer Defold. These things might not be as important for larger studios or experienced devs but for small teams or indie devs they’re important.
So as an indie dev using Defold that gets stuck on a problem I need to either;
A) Try solve it myself
B) Search for resources for other engines then convert those resources to Defold
I find myself often having to do B which kind of makes me think whether or not Defold is the best choice for my situation. I think a lot of smaller engines drive users to the more popular engines because of a lack of resources. Defold is in a unique situation though of being part of King and having the resources to change that.
Content creators aren’t going to create much for Defold because the user base is too small compared to other engines so it’s pretty much left to King staff and a few keen community members to fill that gap.
I think what Defold really needs is regular, well developed content on taking a slightly larger project from start to ship. Or a vertical slice of a larger project even.
That’s not so. Have you seen @benjames171 Examples of Defold tutorial page. They are all complete games that he has made till date, and full of nice code, graphics, fx, everything you expect from a complete game, and ready to be extended of you are really bent on it.
Apart from that l, @britzl also has some good examples from previous jams, which you can easily extend and modify to suit your needs . Hen there is the platformer creation kit in the asset store which can be used to make a basic platformer game. As a game developer, I would suggest that these are more than enough to get started with developing your dream game, and if you get stuck, we are here to help you get out of the problem.
(Moreover, Over time I found that with some adjustments unity tutorials can easily be remolded for Defold.)
Maybe a video on Native Extensions? Or something on particle editor?
@Mitch has a lot of legitimate arguments, for me, as indie, the lack of some examples that do exists for other engines is always painful. I do try to implement things on myself, but look for example at Unity’s platformer kits, both 2d and 3d, so easy to use and yet very powerful and full of different features comparing to our Platformer Creation Kit or Platypus. I’m not saying they are bad, just to point out differences. There are also a vast amount of assets, but you need to bear in mind a lot of them is not free. As you know I’m still a huge fan of Defold and trying to develop assets for it 
though many times I was complaining why something is in Unity or Godot, so I’m getting Mitch’s point of view 
don’t know how, but we must encourage more people to use Defold, as it’s one of the best working, very fast and yet lightweight engine and it’s totally totally free
What could be the next video about? Particle editor sounds good to me next maybe something about creating a multiplayer game? Maybe something about your good practices and tricks in Lua? Something about Lua modules too? O, I know, I would love to watch a tutorial about integrating lights and normal maps! 
Sometimes this
something is in Unity or Godot [but not defold]
Is why we have this
very fast and yet lightweight engine
I see a lot of people mentioning lack of tutorials and examples. And even though “From first line of code -> Finished game” would be great, it simply isn’t feasible - just imagine the time it takes to create a game, then imagine that you have to create a tutorial of it at the same time.
I think that asking for more specific tutorials like “Blender to Defold”, “Making Particle Effects”, “Porting a shadertoy shader” or “Using native extension/library” would have a higher likelihood of getting made.
And that right there is the problem. You have to think from the perspective of most people. If most of the resources available you have to adjust from another engine, why not just use that engine?
Examples from @benjames171 and @britzl are great and a hugely valuable resource but it is still a drop in the ocean. Picking apart others source code also isn’t the same as a tutorial that goes through the creation process and explaining it all. It also won’t appeal to everyone and turn some people away.
This forum is highly active with a handful of people that know their stuff and are very helpful. But how scaleable is that really as a help resource? It works now while the community is small.
Is it really unfeasible though? Defold might have a small community but it is developed by employees of King (2,000 employees in 2017), a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard (9,900 employees in 2018).
King Q4 Segment Net Revenues: $543M
King 2018 Segment Net Revenues: $2,086M
Source: Activision Blizzard Q4 Investor Report
Examples of what I mean of a tutorial that takes you from start to finish;
Tutorial: Match 3 in Godot
Tutorial: Zelda-like game in Unity
Two fleshed out tutorials with good titles that allow people to learn just the sections they need, or from start to finish. For example, my game needs patrolling enemies, I can go to part 34 - Patrolling Enemies. My game needs loot tables, go to part 49 - loot tables. etc etc
If a high school Math/Computer science teacher in rural Montana can make those in his free time. Is it really unfeasible for King to make similar using either their own salaried employees or outsourcing it to content creators?
Seems more of a situation of does King want to do it or not rather than is it feasible or not.
I love Defold and I really want it to succeed as a popular engine. But at it’s current trajectory it’ll remain niche. King has the resources to make it so much more by developing quality content for their engine. But at the end of the day, who really knows what King’s goal is for Defold.
When did Defold release publicly? End of 2015/start of 2016 or something? We’re now April 2019. That’s over 3 years being public. There’s very little resources for over 3 years being public.
GamesBeat: Where do you think this will get used? By small teams, like five people or less?
Hartwig: Smaller studios, yes. If you look at team sizes when we develop our games internally, it’s normally two or three developers and two or three artists. Fairly small teams. I’d assume that if you’re a small indie developer, you’d be about that size or a little bigger or smaller. But small studios in general.
Interview with Hartwig on Defold
If that was the goal in 2016, for Defold to be used by small teams of around 5 or less and it is still the goal. Why would small teams choose Defold when there is still very little resources for it?
Yes, it is true that Defold is a part of King which is a part of Activision Blizzard. But King and AB are companies in the business of making games, not game engines. Unity on the other hand is (well, and to sell Ads). We will never assign hundred of engineers/hundreds of thousands of man hours and/or tens of millions of dollars in making Defold the number one game engine for everyone. We’re a small but highly motivated, passionate and skilled team within the big company that is King and in our team the goal is to make a game engine that can be used efficiently by teams at King to make games, and since GDC 2016 also by external users.
While we want a wide variety of developers to use Defold it is mainly a tool for experienced developers who value a small and performant game engine with the building blocks to make games as opposed to a Swiss army knife of an engine with off-the-shelf assets that can be stitched together into a game without any regard at all given to memory usage, cpu or battery life.
These are quite impressive. It’s like 24 hours of recorded video each. An impressive amount of time spent by a single individual. Do you know if they were commissioned by Godot and Unity or if he created them on his own?
While the videos in themselves are impressive I really question this:
How on earth is the implementation of loot tables so intrinsically connected to a specific game engine? If someone tells an experienced developer the basic idea behind loot tables I would expect him/her to be able to create an implementation in a handful or programming languages without much effort. And I would expect that given some time to familiarise with the API of a game engine the developer would also be able to implement it within a game engine.
We should educate our users (through manuals and/or tutorials) about the following things in Defold:
The above should basically be the Defold specific knowledge you need learn to be able to create loot tables, spawn loot and detect when the player picks it up. You should then be able to take this knowledge and use it to implement other game mechanics such as spawn points for enemies or projectiles for weapons.
Creating tutorials in excruciating detail about every game mechanic or game concept of any conceivable type of game is simply not the best way for us to spend our time. I would much rather spend that time creating manuals, tutorials and videos explaining the concepts and building blocks of Defold so that Defold users/developers can take this knowledge and apply it to implement the specific things they need in their game. This is where we should spend our time and maybe we need to spend more time doing this?
It is still one of our goals.
We see a steady increase in active users since 2016 and we see small teams/studios release really polished Defold games. When we ask why they chose Defold over other more popular engines we get a variety of different answers. Some say that Defold is easy to use. Others that it is small and performant. Yet others mention the active community as a reason.
Just remember that what exists here is an opportunity for you or anyone else to build and release these resources and potentially help thousands of other devs in the future as the community does grow larger… after my next big game goes live I will have a ton of resources to publish, and will be making some new tutorials (and finishing other long in progress medium to advanced learning materials).
So if you want to put your name in gamedev history contribute resources while you still have such a big opportunity to make a big impact!
I know other devs are in similar situation as I am. They are focusing on finishing games and will publish more for the community after. More big games made with Defold will draw in more devs. Any super massive mega hits will bring in a lot of new devs. I don’t think that has happened yet with Defold (at least from non-King devs) while other game engines have dozens of mega hits to their name but it probably will happen in the future because some really cool games are being made by people here. 
We are the ordinary three man Indie. One client dev, one game/art designer, one server dev.
I choose Defold as a client dev because it is a (almost)bare-bones 2D game engine with simple but great components. You can simply focus on your game and your code. You have the control over the performance, libraries, shaders, render pipeline, UI… Native Extensions are big bonus. It is a huge advantage that your questions are answered(fast) by core Defold developer team and other talented developers. You can’t buy or easily find that!
But before I decided to use Defold for production I spent almost a year with it. Yes I’m hitting walls and get mad with Defold sometimes. But this is the part of the game dev progress and not just special to Defold.
I must say that %90 of Unity community is sucks. Newcomers, kids, hobbyists… Most of the answered questions and assets are junk too. And who wants to develop a game with premade assets anyway… If you want control, you should do it by yourself.
Defold or Unity or whatever! is not important. Choosing correct tools for the right kind of game is the most important thing in game development. It is related to experience. If you know what you are doing and the engine’s limitations well none of these are the real issue… Also solving problems by myself is a gift for me, It teachs a lot.
Advanced particle editor and shader tutorial please
Yes, indeed. I’m strugling to complete a boss level for UDGJ#1 meanwhile releasing Defluid and Defork for my game and still have plans to share a lot of stuff when I find more time to clean and describe them
I tried making my game in both Godot and Unity and it was hard to modify assets to my needs as I am able to do in Defold. (Well, I also tried Game Maker, Game Salad and Corona, but don’t want to say anything about them) Also worth mentioning is that Unity is showed in 2005 and Godot since the beginning of 2014, so they are older than Defold.
And BTW, I’m very excited of what @Pkeod is planning to publish and waiting for it impatiently!
My comments were on other people saying it’s unfeasible to for King to create more content, tutorials and documentation for their engine. And I still stand by that it is 100% easily possible for them IF they want to.
You’re moving the goal posts. It’s a very big difference between having more documentation and tutorials etc which could be easily done by either outsourcing it to smaller youtube content creators or having 1-2 employees work full time on creating content and requiring hundreds of engineers, 100,000+ hours and tens of millions of dollars. Those 2 things aren’t even in the same field.
Could King reallocate 1 employee to full time content creation for Defold, employ a new staff or pay for outside content creation? I would be shocked if they couldn’t if they wanted to. The issue is whether or not they want to do it, like I said initially.
If your target market is focused on ‘experienced developers’ then is it really necessary to make videos reading documentation or teaching github. I would say creating loot tables the ‘Defold way’ is ‘more intrinsically connected to a specific game engine’ than github basics are.
From my understanding created on his own.
Yup and if Defold had a similar tutorial resource it would cover the Defold way of doing a project from start to finish. It would be an invaluable addition that would draw in more users some of which would be the ‘experienced developers’ you seek.
Definitely. I’m surprised to see so much kickback for suggesting that Defold needs more fleshed out documented quality content after a Defold employee asked for suggestions for video content.
What I’m trying to say is that King is not developing Defold to make money out of it. We’re quite happy with the current structure and we have no plans to compete with for instance Unity and the hundreds of developers they have working on that product.
We do have one technical writer assigned to the Defold team to create content for our Learn section. He’s currently on parental leave and there is no plan to replace him while he is gone. We could potentially pay for outside content creation (and we have to some extent in the past) but there are no plans to make anything big in that regard during 2019.
There’s a big difference between creating a 24 hour video tutorial covering the creation of a game from start to end and the creation of specific video tutorial content. We will continue to create short videos explaining specific areas and I believe that is what @Oleg_The_Evangelist was asking for.