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

Questions
#21

I vote «almost better than building a game engine yourself», because beyond the pun, that’s it.

I’ve tried many other engines (can i say ? Yes? Ok it was Godot, Unity and Löve2D). Löve2D was my favorite, but too low level for doing something else than little games or reinventing the wheel all the time. Unity was bloated for 2D. Godot was a fight against its horrible script language, and the feeling of an engine that bites off more than it can chew.

With Defold and a bit of practice, you’re finding yourself very productive, at last !

Defold: don’t fight the engine, just make games ! :slight_smile:

6 Likes
#22

Yeah, this one-liner approach is fun. The poll (it is not closed yet, you still can vote) hints Defold users indeed enjoy the process of using Defold, just not in the way I/we could anticipate. The way I read it, you folks seem to enjoy Defold not because it is easy or fun to use, but because you can use it exactly the way you want.

I guess now it is time for Defold team to figure out, how this knowledge can help attract more users to Defold.

2 Likes
#23

There’s a reason to update this topic a bit. At GDC we demoed Defold to several big and well experienced teams and got decent feedback. In fact, everybody got amazed about Defold because…

Experienced teams can build the engine the way they need without ever messing with our source code.

So teams can use Defold the way they need/want, can add or remove many core, low level components and they still would be compatible with Defold editor, tools, pipeline, build automation, cloud services, platform code… So our stable and minimal core supplemented by the system of native extensions and powered by you, Defold community, actually makes lots of sense!

This puts Defold to a well-defined niche between Cocos2D (assemble your own engine from a set of incompatible source code repos) and Unity (a closed toolset for immersive VR-worlds or match3-puzzles).

Makes sense? :woman_mechanic:t4:

5 Likes
#24

Yup. Makes sense. For example, I now have about 5 native extensions in our game, 3 of which are written by me (FMOD, workarounds for a couple engine bugs and some util functions) and one to which I contributed (DefOS). Not counting our own project specific abstractions for message dispatch, post processing filters, GUI auto-layout, scene management, GUI widgets, orchestration coroutines, etc. Also not counting the build scripts I could write and the continuous deployment I was able to set up for our project.

The fact that I could build my own tooling around the lightweight engine core is pretty cool. I’m hoping Defold pushes towards a more mature native extension SDK. That would be a great step towards that niche.

9 Likes
#25

For me lua is the key point that i prefer Defold.(the magic lua table) The message system is an interesting method then calling some functions directly. And it’s so easy to bundle projects in different platforms.

3 Likes