Detailed comparison between Godot vs Defold?

Questions
#1

So, I’m a long time Godot user, I’m loving it, but obviously just like most software/tools it’s not perfect. Sadly Godot is the only Game Engine I know, so I don’t know how bad/good Godot is.

Now Defold’s source code got open, which made me more interested in the Defold game engine. Also a good opportunity to check out another game-engine.

Are there people who made 2 “serious/big” games with those 2 different engines? What’s your opinion?

What’s your opinion with GDscript/C# versus Lua?
Which has better GUI tool support?
What annoys you about Defold and Godot? And what do you like about them?
Most importantly (at least for me) which makes you the most productive?

I think Godot has better “all-round” game-development features and is more matured, while Defold has more polished 2D mobile development? Or is that an outdated view?

I’m personally interesting to build a game like FireEmblem/Advance Wars stylish 2D strategy game… I think Godot is overkill and it’s good time to test and built on Defold…

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#2

Hi and welcome @Qws!

I’m not super familiar with the games you’re referencing, but I suspect Defold will be a great fit for that type of game.

I recommend this thread for a good discussion on what you’re asking (it’s a bit dated by now though, so not sure if all the points remain true).

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#3

GDscript is not very well battle tested language and I believe it has serious issues.
C# support on Godot is not production ready.
Lua is battle tested and used for many AAA games. Also luajit is much more powerful then GDScript(and many other languages).

It depends…
Godot has better build-in GUI component support. You can just drag drop things. But every time you drop something on your scene, it is going to bring tons of waste code with it and you can’t control it at all.

Defold has DIY style approach. You got only basic components. Do you need input box or check box, you have to do it yourself(or you can use assets). You got all the control, I always prefer this approach.

There are tons of annoying things almost at every engine. It really depends the developer and the game you are developing. There is a recent discussion about Defold.

I personally like Godot, except the programming language. I’m never going to use it with GDscript and never until C# support is mature enough(until a few years perhaps). I wish it has a build in c/c++ support(not talking about the extensions)

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#4

I just want to add that with Defold, it is also possible to use Haxe instead of Lua: https://github.com/hxdefold/hxdefold

In case you prefer type-safe OOP languages like C# over scripting ones.

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#5

It’s like a board game (chess e.g) but when 2 units confront each other there will be a turn-based Pokemon style combat.

So it’s grid based combat game with (multiple) animation-players, GUI based navigation and … lots of dialogs. I would also like to create Animation Players in runtime.

I suspect Defold can handle it, but I wonder how well compared to Godot.

For example, Defold uses Spine for animation? Does Defold has its own visual adjustable animation-player or does all the animation stuff gets done in Spine? It would be nice imo if Defold has its own animation-player.

Hmm I prefer to write GUI in code as well, but I definitely like to drag and drop for fast prototyping then (slowly) transist into a code-based GUI generation.

Personally I have no problems with GDscript…:sweat_smile: In fact, GDscript is one of my favorite part of Godot Engine, it’s easy to read, it has optional typing, it has clean and simple modern syntax. I don’t really see serious issues with the language. Let say I take 6 months break after writing Dart or C#, and I come back to GDscript, I can quickly pick it up again… because simplicity is high priority with GDscript. There aren’t many strange syntax sugars or keywords GDscript.

Lua looks also simple at first glance, but then I see some strange syntax going on… I believe Lua Array start with a 1… instead of 0 like most languages. I don’t know, I probably would get used to it but still…

Apparently there is also Haxe support, which I didn’t knew about.:slightly_smiling_face:

#6

Haxe looks interesting for sure, I might try Haxe over Lua to be honest even tho I do prefer (optional typed) scripting language. But only if it’s well documented and supported by devs and community.

I personally think the most important part of a game-engine (and other frameworks/libraries) is:

  1. How intuitive and enjoyable it is to work with it
  2. How productive are you with it

Defold seems super polished and fun to work with, but I fear it’s feature wise not on level of Godot/Unity…? Arguably not even close? Is that right?

Which is a bummer. I feel like Defold community and especially the Defold Team is more enthusiastic and alive about their engine than some of the Godot team members with Godot.

I would really like to try and invest time in Defold, but I think as 1 person with limited resources… Godot would make games done quicker than Defold… which is a huge deal if we talk objectively…

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#7

I suggest you take a look at the showcases category:
https://forum.defold.com/c/Show-your-Defold-work

And perhaps in particular Fates Of Ort.

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#8

Nope, Defold doesn’t have anywhere near the same amount of features as Unity or Godot, nor will it ever. It’s meant to be minimalist and good at the low-level stuff, not a “does everything” toolkit. In fact the Defold team has focused quite a lot of time on removing features from the core engine (making them into extensions)

I am sure you will be more productive with Godot. If you end up thinking that the higher production speed is a tradeoff for a lower quality end result – then try Defold.

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#9

welcome Qws
unfortunately i have not used Godot before but compare to unity and gamemaker, Defold gives better html5 build. much better than unity. i think android bundle is much smaller than Godot too, Defold gives just 2MB apk for empty project but i thinkg it’s more than 15Mb for Godot and more than 10MB in unity and more than 7MB in game maker too. maybe it’s not important in your country but in our country and some other places in the world it is.
I don’t know about Godot community but as you said I like Defold team and Defold users too, if you follow defold guys in twitter you’ll find lot of kind friends which support each other, I feel we are all in one team.

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#10
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#11

Stumble upon this thread from google

With the recent changes that they have added to GDScript, I think it has evolved into a very productive programming language to work with. However I think the issue with GDScript is that it’s not performant at all, everything has to go to the looks up, before it go through the actual things, meanwhile in C++ you just go straight to the memory address. Optimizing a language like GDScript is potentially very difficult due to heavily String-based, ie signal connections, Object’s set() and get() methods, among other things.

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