Hooked! Panya, My first commercial game with Defold - live on Playgama

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Hey all — solo dev here, gamedev alongside a full-time job. Just shipped my first commercial title on Playgama: Hooked! Panya, a portrait HTML5 tap-timing fishing game.

Quick writeup on why Defold worked for me.

Why Defold

I’m learning Lua and learning to draw at the same time as building this, on limited hours. Defold’s robust engine and fast iteration loop meant I could spend that time on design and art instead of fighting the engine.

With the help from Druid and Monarch extensions, I didn’t have to write a UI framework or a screen manager from scratch. That’s real hours back for actual gameplay work.

And the fast iteration loop are very helpful to my workflow (I still remember how long it takes to build HTML5 build in Unity :sweat_smile: ). Made testing portal-specific stuff actually manageable solo.

Game’s live on Playgama now, still very early so no metrics worth sharing yet.

PS: Thanks for the amazing work from Defold Team, @britzl for Monarch, @Insality for Druid, @Pawel (you’re tutorial on Youtube rocks!) and other fellow gamedevs in here for the inspiration and knowledge

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Congrats on your first release! It’s a fun game! I noticed a few things:

  • The game was released with Defold 1.12.1. It’s a pretty old version. There are some benefits to upgrading to 1.13.1
  • It looks like you uploaded a debug build, ie with console output from your game visible in the Chrome developer console.
  • Did you use any size optimization strategies (Optimizing size of a Defold game)? The game is 6.6MB or so, which is not too bad, but maybe you can reduce size further by excluding engine features you don’t need?
  • I think you should add keyboard controls. The Space key could be used to Reel in fish and to Cast Again.
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Congratulation! :partying_face: