How suitable is Defold for a Dwarf Fortress style game on desktop?

Questions
#1

Hi everyone,

Im evaluating defold for a Dwarf Fortress/Rimworld. Also, I really like that Defold seems to be more codeoriented rather than heavily editor-driven, which suits my workflow

  1. How suitable is Defold for this type of game using only Lua? I don’t plan to use C++.
  2. I have read many positive comments about defolds performance on web and mobile, but how does it perform for desktop games ?
  3. Since Defold seems to be more focused on web and mobile, what challenges or limitations might I encounter when targeting desktop platforms?

I’d appreciate any experiences or advice you can share. :blush:

#2

Defold and Lua is an excellent choice for the writing of a Dwarf Fortress style game, for any platform. The development time will be ~20 years (based on that of DF), so you want a game engine that retains backward compatibility; most of those other engines have breaking changes in just about every release. Lua has no dependencies; it just needs an ANSI C compiler, there likely will be one working in 2044.

Amongst the many articles on DF here is a link to one: 700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built - Stack Overflow

Great idea to write such a game regardless of what software you use, good luck and enjoy.

6 Likes
#3

Thanks for replying! I was running out of sleep these past few weeks just thinking about learning SDL2, OpenGL, and C++ until I found Defold. I liked what you mentioned about long-term compatibility. In my work as a web developer, I find it frustrating when a month passes and everything is already deprecated, which is partly why I use Go a lot with the standard library.

As for the 20 years, I’m not sure if my mental health will allow me to go that long, but I plan to take it step by step and see how far I get.

P.S.: Now I’ll keep losing sleep thinking about how to structure the project .

1 Like