Introduce yourself

#430

Hello everyone, I’m new to Defold! I dabbled in game design throughout the years, first started with the OG RPG maker back in the days lol and moved to different platforms. I even used the old Adventure Craft mod that transformed Minecraft into a game engine by adding functionalities and Javascript. (Made the trailer for the mod back in the days) I’m a graphic/web designer by trade but also dabble in music playing and production, video stuff, Gothic modeling and other stuff lol. I recently opened two online clothing stores and pretty much did everything from logistics to design and coding. I’m constantly learning new stuff and refining my knowledge in different fields. Never was good at school though, prefer to learn by myself and at my own pace.

I’ve had many games idea in my head throughout the years and decided it was time and just try and make them. Completed the Youtube tutorial and now ready to go the next step. That’s how I learn, move headfirst and do stuff lol. I like Defold so far, Lua seems really easy to learn, reminds me of different coding languages into one. This community seems great, might cath me asking a lot of questions :smiley: Have a good night/day whatever lol

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#431

Welcome to the Defold community!

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#432

thank you!

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#433

I think this is pretty common to most of us here! Ask away and good luck with your projects

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#434

Hi from the very north of Sweden. :blush:

I have created various programs and games since the early 80’s (yes, previous century). Published first game in 2000 and latest was a simple test game for Android on Google play. Surprisingly it has spread a lot.

Am working on another game now and will try it with Defold due to the active community, regular updates, small builds and versitile engine.

Have worked with Unreal, GameMaker, Fusion 2.5, LiveCode and tested a few other.

I will have questions but will of course do searches first. :grin:

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#435

Välkommen!

I love it!

Sounds great! Don’t hesitate to ask here or on Discord.

#436

Hi everyone!
My name is Gregory, a 32 years old Belgian :belgium: I discovered Defold yesterday after a search on Google for a 2D game engine, and then poof, here I’m after running away from Unity.

It’s been 2 years now that I’m working on my own (desktop) video game for professional purpose. I tried several game engines and frameworks then three months ago I made the mistake to think that Unity would be the right choice, but I changed my mind yesterday after what happened :eyes: My only regret is that I didn’t know Defold earlier, but it’s fine, I wasn’t far (at all) in my work.

Also, I noticed that your documentation is not available in French :face_with_monocle: Since it’s my native language, I started translating it according to your information for translators. But it’s my first time doing something like this on Github, so I have some questions like, am I allowed to? :thinking: So I’ll look for the right category.

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#437

Welcome Gregory!

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#438

Hello everyone, my name is Loroko. I am a comic book writer and artist who is now making video games. I have completed one game called In Transit using the GDevelop engine and have decided to migrate over to Defold. I hear it has a wonderful community and am really looking forward to learning and developing the best fucking games i possibly can. I am starting with a port of my previous game to get to know the engine and work flow. I’m sure you will see me here a lot asking a ton of questions hahaha. cheers, and happy Defolding!

Loroko

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#439

Welcome @Nightchromatic! I saw some of your videos already, great you are making them! :star_struck:

Welcome @BlackFlyPress! I was checking out GDevelop and it’s a nice solution, especially for first learning of game development - would love to hear how do you feel about it and how do you compare it to Defold? :smiley:

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#440

GDevelop is great! Perfect for those just getting into gamedev. It is a “no code” engine, but the fact is you cant build anything worth the time without some code knowledge. Its interface is not my favorite, It could be a little more user friendly and less cluttered.
Defold is still very new to me, but I love its simple and elegant interface & The API is great. Obviously, much more code knowledge is needed but i think its worth the trouble for the amount of power it unlocks.
What they both have in common is scarcity in YouTube video tutorials haha!

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#441

Hello everyone!
I am Abdulla, a game design student from Dubai living in the Netherlands. I am a generalist interested in UI/UX design, pixel art, software architecture and more. I have been learning about Defold for a few weeks now and I must say I am very impressed. I don’t know how I missed it! I really wish I had incorporated Defold earlier in my study, but at least we are here now. :yum:. What stood out for me is how sober your design philosophy is. You know what you want, and you follow through! And you are some of the friendliest developers I have seen, always answering questions and interacting with the community. It looks like a great engine and a community to invest in for the long term. I look forward to learning from you, and when I am ready contribute as well. :slight_smile:

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#442

hey! welcome! yeah, defold is pretty neat, right? lookin forward to see what u come up with.

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#443

Hey there, I’m a software developer with quite a few years of experience. Ever since I started coding, I’ve had this itch to create games, but I never really saw a project through to the end. I kind of put that dream on the back burner for a while, but recently, it’s come back stronger than ever. I’ve made up my mind to build a full-fledged game, doing it the right way, with all the professional bells and whistles.

I settled on Defold because it seems pretty straightforward yet powerful, and it’s all about 2D, which is my jam, to be honest. I’m not the biggest fan of those big-shot AAA games like the ones EA or Ubisoft put out, but man, do I have a sweet collection of indie games on Steam. I really hope that one day, some of those games will be the ones that I’ve built myself.

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#444

Hi everyone,
My name is Dani, I’ve been playing with Defold for some time. Tried some tutorials, recreated a side project previously made in Phaser3, but never finished it. This time I am confident to finish my first game with Defold. I like 2D games, I found Defold to be the perfect tool for my needs.

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#445

:love_you_gesture: :sunglasses: Hi, how are you?.

I consider myself an autonomous developer and very curious, thanks to this I found Defold and this community that inspired me confidence, I recognize that it is my first registration in a forum and I hope it will not be a disappointing experience. :nerd_face:

Best wishes, your friend Visionaire. :relaxed:

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#446

Hi, I’m working on a game engine abstraction using TypeScript. My goal is to define types and interfaces commonly used by a broad range of games (entities, events, 2D & 3D rendering, CLI, physics, behaviors, and so on). I would use these to make my own games. Two kinds of games I am developing (the concept for) include grid-based board games like Chess or Go, and RPG (classic text adventure, 2D like Zelda, 3D like WoW).

The more I dig into what is out there and begin to develop the interfaces, the more I feel like I’m actually designing a VM. I came across Defold via js13k. I also see there is a ts-defold project which has some TypeScript declarations and templates, allowing a Defold game to be declared and coded using TypeScript, which sounds a lot like what I’m trying to do.

Aside from a sense of overall completeness of desired game engine features, Defold looks useful because it already has deployment targets for all the major platforms, including JavaScript via Emscripten, and also has Lua support, which is great because I want to support modding out of the box.

I had originally looked at lua.vm.js as a way to accomplish this, but it looks like Defold already supports Lua, so if I understand correctly, if I implement my VM using Defold, I get Lua with little to no additional effort.

Does this sound like a reasonable way to go about things? Has this been tried before, and if so, where may I find the tales of horror that ensued?

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#447

Yes, Lua is the main language used for writing game logic in Defold games.

I suppose most games add their own functionality on top of the engine to solve common problems, but what you describe sounds like building a game engine on top of a game engine?

It is not necessarily bad but it will mean that you add another layer of code in between the engine and the game, which means some overhead.

I recently played around with a game framework inspired by Kaboom.js on top of Defold:

It was a fun exercise and you can definitely create games using something like that.

#448

I think at some point the engine-specific code just has to be written, and it is outside of the scope of what I’m working on to be all things for all engines. I’m thinking more of a way to semi-formally define the most common parts of a game, the core. What could be considered portable not just across deployment targets, but even different types of games? I see there has been some work in creating template generators, so I’m asking the question: can these templates be expressed in a language (perhaps a DSL that is actually defined with Lua or TypeScript)?

To be a little more concrete, I’m looking at kaboom and it feels a lot like Lisp. So then I’m thinking, why not take something like GitHub - udem-dlteam/ribbit: A small and portable Scheme implementation with AOT and incremental compilers that fits in 4K. It supports closures, tail calls, first-class continuations and a REPL. which can transpile Scheme to Lua and JavaScript (and other targets) and see if I can make an abstraction for boom and kaboom. So I have at least 3 ways to get from Scheme to a playable game: Scheme → kaboom (pure JavaScript), Scheme → boom (pure Lua), or Scheme → TypeScript → ts-defold.

I think what I am going for is a way to specify a template that would generate more or less equivalent structures in each of those cases. Not necessarily something that would then be able to run at that point, but would define the main components and need minimal amounts of glue code to get from the structure to the target engine. There are at least 2 reasons I want to do this: for humans to be able to look at the template code and easily see the top-level structure and note similarities and differences between templates, and for machines to be able to load a set of human-provided templates and apply so-called genetic programming operations. The results would probably be mostly unplayable, but may be an interesting way to try to combine different game genres in unexplored ways.

I’m going to see if I can get some Hello World level stuff working. I think this would all make a lot more sense if there were some real code involved. :grinning:

#449

The more I think about it, the more it is like a shadowy flight into the world of a console that never existed. I want to define a “cartridge” format that is very high level, and then an emulator which handles the nuts and bolts of the structures and operations defined by the cartridge.

For most of my initial cases, I don’t need anything too fancy. However, I can picture having a general purpose emulator that isn’t very optimized, and uses TypeScript as an intermediate step so that we can reject cartridges that don’t compile. There could then also be a high-performance emulator, if we need something faster for production, that goes directly to Lua, much the same way that you can just write plain JavaScript that is identical to the eventual output of TypeScript. Then you have the problem of making sure the two implementations “work” the same, which hopefully can be alleviated with automated testing.

Two games I’m picturing off the bat:

Comango
Turn based grid, like Chess or Go. A short rule string defines the size of the board, scoring options (territory capture, pair capture, N-in-a-row, etc), end-of-game conditions, etc for each playthrough. “8PR” would be like Reversi, “19C” would be Go, and “15k5P” would be Gomoku. I think it would be fun to add combat and movement as options. Instead of playing a piece every turn, a turn could be used to move a piece one unit in any direction. Or perhaps a piece could attack an adjacent piece, and maybe a dice roll decides who wins and who is removed from the board.

NPC
RPG, could be text-based, 2.5D, open world 3D. At the start of the game, the player is an NPC minding their own business in their idyllic fantasy town. Suddenly, the Hero has a massive battle with the Villain in the middle of the town square. Reaching a stalemate, the two opposing forces slink back to their respective camps in tatters, and your town is all but destroyed. The other townspeople start rebuilding, and this time they’ll find a way to keep the battle on the outskirts. At the same time, the Hero and Villain are rebuilding their armies, and if they become ready before you’re done rebuilding, they will destroy your town once and for all. As an NPC, you can’t do much directly, but if there is one thing you’re good at, it’s having powerful items you can’t equip in your inventory that you give to a Hero or Villain as a reward for fulfilling a quest. So put that exclamation point over your head and get ready to hand out some missions. Act 1 as an Inkle script

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