Render scripts and helper modules to handle a camera, screen-to-world transforms, etc., are the number one thing that I spend a lot of time fussing with when I would like to be working on gameplay. I’ve done several different versions and I still don’t have a setup that I’m really confident about, so it’s a fight every time I start a new project.
Defold really needs a good, extensive, UI library to be easy and quick to make games with, but I think that’s way beyond the scope of a template project. Maybe you could include a simple button setup though.
Setting up the broader game organization and UI stuff (menus, a game mode collection proxy, etc. ) is another thing that I always procrastinate about when starting a new project. Working out gameplay is always fun, but it seems like a big hurdle to get from just gameplay to a more complete game that you can start up, press “Play”, pause, resume, die, restart, quit to the menu, quit the game, etc.
It’s hard to say what’s the most universal thing without assuming tons of things about other people’s projects, this is just two cents from my perspective.
Oh, I also have a little module that I use in every project. It’s just some simple math, array, and other random functions, see it here. (round() and sign() really should be in the default math library, but what can ya do )