How do you describe what Defold is in a single line?

Questions
#1

Y’know, year end and all that… time for recaps and future thoughts on what Defold is, and what Defold will be for you, Defold users.

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On Defold website we put it as “The ultimate engine for 2D games” and “The best way for you to create 2D games for web and mobile”. We also utilise “The best game engine for mobiles and web”, which is very similar.

But may be “the bests” and “the ultimates” describe too little and don’t really tell much?

So how would you tell your friend what Defold is in a single line?

Just to get this going, my personal take on this:
Defold is a gamedev environment that helps people make better games.

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#2

In one line ?

Defold: the King’s engine

:slight_smile:

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#3

The Defold engine unfolds the complexity of Lua programming and adapts to infinite styles of development.

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#4

another one in my head:
Defold is a game engine that is fun to use

Guess we’ll do a poll after a while =] Or may be we’ll just have a nice Defold pitching contest.

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#5

Anything that ends with thus making the world a better place.™ is fine in my book.

If I may suggest, replace web and mobile by cross-platform or across all your devices* in order not to forget about the humble PC :wink:

*except consoles
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#6

This, though it totally depends on who your audience is. If you’re talking to beginners who have no idea how games are made, then words like “best”, “easy”, “fun”, and “help” may be good to get their attention. On the other hand, if you’re talking to people who have read a bit (or have tried another engine/framework but weren’t satisfied with it) and are shopping around for a game engine that fits their needs, words like that are just marketing fluff that they have to wade through to find what they want to know.

I would say something like:

Here are some points I try to cover on the occasions I tell other people about Defold (I try not to be a shill, to each their own). In order:

[Edit] I forgot to say: FREE!

  • Fast
  • Small builds
  • Relatively small feature set — “slim”, “lean”, “lightweight”, “framework”.
    • It’s somewhere between lower-level frameworks like Love2D, and huge engines like Unity and Unreal
    • It doesn’t have tons of built-in features: motion blur effects, automatic nav-meshes, behavior trees, animation blending . . . hair rendering, blah-de-blah . . .
  • Has an editor
    • If you talk too much about “minimal” and “framework” people may think it doesn’t have an editor. I like to keep expectations low but not that low.
  • Lua scripting
  • Actually cross-platform: Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Mac, and Linux.
    • Other engines may say “cross-platform” when they only support Windows, Mac, and iOS, or some nonsense. Linux is very often left out. (I know Linux editor and builds are a significant draw for Godot.)
  • Builds easily for all platforms — A few clicks. You don’t need to change your code, download external tools, or go through complicated steps.
  • However it is definitely mobile-focused
  • Great documentation and support
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#7

I would say something like

Defold is game engine that is easy and enjoyable for every team member.

'Cause it’s truth. When I started learning Defold I’ve been solo developer, and every aspect of game development, be it code, level design or art, everything was making me happy and proud of my work.

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#8

Defold is a cross-platform game engine. Lean, clean and adorable.

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#9

I also asked around on twitters and other internets. Here are some of the best one liners.

The most popular buffs brand

Guess people love our swag =]

In Defold we trust

Fast, easy, reliable. All platforms

Very fast, less than 60 mb binary, stable fps with our game that features 2000+ objects on multiple layers with alpha channel.

Thanks for your replies, everyone. Guess we’ll do a poll later on to reflect on your suggestions. Oh, and feel free to come in with more one liners, as you feel like it.

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#10

Making 2D and light 3D game design simple and accessible to all

#11

Great input from everyone, thanks for contributing! The way I see it—and now I’m only talking about the opening one-liner on defold.com, and not other use cases for one-liners—is that it’s purpose is not to weigh all the pros and cons of Defold, but to being interesting and vague (in lack of a better word) enough to entice people’s curiosity to make them want to read on, while still mentioning 2D to not falsely attract people who want do 3D stuff.

That’s the idea that led to the opening blurb “The ultimate engine for 2D games”. Not because we thought that was the only way to describe defold in its entirety, but because it was a good trade-off between vague, and what we wanted to focus on—while at the same time being short enough for that section. We don’t want to seem like our goal is to compete with Unity (which it isn’t), but rather expose our strengths; as a valid option for e.g. ex-Flash devs who yet hasn’t found a replacement fit for them, or for those who want to make mobile games (while not excluding desktop, of course).

Next up regarding the website is a revamp of the Product section which, more or less, hasn’t seen any love for more than a year. The content in this thread is key to finding what we should focus on there, hands down :raised_hands:

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#12

I guess it is time for a short reflection.

From this forum thread, Slack channel and personal discussions with Defold users, I can see the following:

Things where we may want to possibly pivot to be more in line with what Defold users experience

  • We kinds of pitch Defold as “hard to use, but easy to ship with”, but lots of Defold users consider Defold easy to use
  • We kinds of develop Defold with a focus on easy live ops, but most Defold users actually enjoy the development process

That’s what we seem to be doing right

  • We invest a lot in stability and robustness of our software, and our users love it, even though it means we may ship new features slow
  • We focus on size and speed of Defold runtime, and our users appreciate it, even though it means the engine/editor is harder to use sometimes

And one more thing I’d love to reflect on:
We design the engine so it requires very low maintenance on user side - convenient dependencies, build automation, no breaking changes, swift engine upgrades, often releases - but no one really mentioned it as a reason to use Defold.

So is the “easy to use” term concealing the “low maintenance” term, or is it something Defold users just got used to so much, they no longer notice it?

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#13

The only Engine without U in the name.

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#14

Defold is easy. I’m not sure why people would think it’s hard. The editor is easy to use and intuitive. The “hard parts” are not really hard just not super obvious to people used to making games in different ways. You’ve had experience with newcomers to game development. I would guess they would not have the same hangups, such as with message passing or uncoupled nature of the engine. It’s easy just different!

Defold is a 3D engine, it’s not a 2D engine, it just does 2D in a 3D engine really well, and 3D will hopefully get better in time. I get that it’s not a good idea to sell that it’s a 3D engine while 3D doesn’t have everything 3D users might expect, but it’s still a 3D engine.

Engine being stable is really great. Only times I’ve ever had it crash was with native extensions, and then it was my fault.

I really like the reliable shipping process. I’m also going to miss the bleeding edge of Editor 2 once it goes stable if it goes away then. I hope we can still get access to unstable versions like now in the future.

We design the engine so it requires very low maintenance on user side - convenient dependencies, build automation, no breaking changes, swift engine upgrades, often releases - but no one really mentioned it as a reason to use Defold.

I love these features and they are a big reason why I’m using it. This is world class software.

So is the “easy to use” term concealing the “low maintenance” term, or is it something Defold users just got used to so much, they no longer notice it?

Yes, squeaky wheel gets the oil. Humans will complain about things which bother them 100 times before they praise something which they appreciate. If things people really appreciate but don’t pay attention to break or go missing you will know.

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#15

If you tell people that it’s hard to use, then it’s much more likely that they will say, “No no, it’s really easy to use!”. They’ll see it as a challenge. Tell them that it’s really easy and they’ll just complain about how it’s not. (P.S. My next paragraph illustrates this point . . . )

When I started with Defold I found it very weird, inflexible, and occasionally much more complex than seemed necessary (quaternions and vector3s for a 2D engine?! Custom scripting with matrices just to zoom the camera?!), but like Pkeod says, I had used other engines before and had assumptions about how things would work.

I chose to try Defold because it was free, cross-platform, has an editor, and I tested its speed and it beat everything else I tried(except on web, but still decent there). All the other features are just icing on the cake (or hurdles to work around).

I’ve been using it long enough that I forgot how ridiculously buggy other engines are. Definitely! :smiley:

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#16

Defold - almost better than building it yourself :grinning:

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#17

It’s like a wind-up slogan, but it’s true :slight_smile:

It’s a good thing when an engine brings you what you would probably having done in the end.

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#18

Just do it – Defold.

Defold. Be a maker!

Make games your way.

The trusted source for impatient game developers.

Empower yourself.

I personally like the second and the last ones.

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#19

I love it all. Thank you all so much for taking the time here.

I guess I shall make a poll later on this week. May be for the fun, may be for a new tag line for our website =]

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#20

Since my last post here I’ve been to a few gamedev events, spoke to different people across the industry and tried to throw in some of the one-liners from this thread. Fun fact: the “almost better than building it yourself” pitch by @drabuna1 resulted in the most resonance in my small and non-scientific research.

But to make this thread fun again, I took the liberty of putting some of the [a bit edited] one-liners into a poll right here.

Please vote for the one-liner that resonates with why you use Defold most.

  • Defold is the King’s next gen game engine
  • Defold is a 2D game engine that is easy and enjoyable for every team member
  • Defold is a gamedev environment that inspires people make better games
  • Defold is a fast, Lua-based game engine that builds seamlessly for mobile, web, and desktop
  • Defold is a lean, clean, adorable and just fun to use game engine
  • Defold - almost better than building a game engine yourself

0 voters

Show results

And feel free to help me change the wording in the poll so you like it more.

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