Hacktoberfest 2026 
October means Hacktoberfest, and we’d like to use the occasion to invite you to help us make Defold better!
We’re not officially joining Hacktoberfest this year, as the event has moved away from its traditional pull-request-based format, but we still think it is a great opportunity to celebrate open source, source available and other projects and invite more people to contribute, especially to Defold.
Read the details about Hacktoberfest below:
There are also local events - maybe in your city!
Defold source is available for everyone to inspect, build and contribute to under the Defold License, based on Apache 2.0. The engine is free to use, with no subscriptions or runtime fees, and we want to keep it that way. Community contributions play an important part in making that possible.
And contributing doesn’t necessarily mean diving into the engine and editor code. You can help us improve:
- documentation, manuals and tutorials,
- examples and sample projects (e.g. 3D person playground),
- editor translations,
- extensions, assets and libraries,
- report bugs and reproducible test cases,
- and, if you’re an experienced developer, the engine, editor and tooling themselves.
Sometimes fixing a manual or creating a good example can help thousands of developers. Those contributions matter a lot to us!
The Defold Foundation is funded through community donations, corporate partnerships, and support work. This funding helps cover infrastructure, build servers, test hardware and other costs required to keep the engine actively developed and freely available. Defold has a dedicated team working every day on the engine, editor, tooling, documentation, platform support and the community around it, but it has been since public source code release in 2020 much more than the work of the team, and it is developed together with its community.
We are incredibly grateful to everyone who supports us - whether it’s through donations via GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, or PayPal, contributing code or documentation, helping other developers on the forum and Discord, or becoming a corporate partner.
It is particularly rewarding to see people who have been part of the Defold community for years later decide to support the project even further. A great recent example is the journey of @Alex_8BitSkull - who after using Defold for almost a decade to build and release commercial games, joined the Defold Foundation this year as a Bronze Partner.
Every contribution, donation and partnership helps us continue developing Defold together.
Thank you! 
A note about AI-assisted contributions
The reason Hacktoberfest is different this year is an increased amount of PRs with AI-assisted contributions or ones made entirely by AI.
AI coding tools can be extremely useful, but Hacktoberfest should be about useful contributions, not about generating pull requests just for the sake of it.
Defold is deliberately designed to be small, fast and efficient. Every addition to the engine, beside advantages, might have an unavoidable cost: size increase, affecting memory, performance, complexity, portability and long-term maintenance, that we consider every time we make a change. So, no matter if a contribution was written entirely by hand or with substantial help from an AI tool, we expect that you understand the code you submit and are able to explain why it is a good fit. The best is always to prepare a design document upfront to discuss with the team, then prepare an implementation. Before the PR, there have to be a preexisting and approved ticket/issue on Github.
Read the details for contributing to engine and editor source code here:
Happy Hacktoberfest!
