Mental Model Minis Series (3 games)

Showcases
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First off, thanks so much to the Defold team for creating this incredible tool!
We were able to launch three short games in a matter of months with just two people. The games are tailored for use in the classroom and include online teacher’s guides.

For those interested in the full story: (and feel free to use whatever you want as testimonial)
We created several rapid prototypes last year using GDevelop and other tools, and refined them through in-classroom testing. This year, we decided to polish up three of them and make them available for free to educators and students.
We’ve used many engines in the past, our last five projects were made in Unity, but we were looking to change. We created the same game in five different engines for evaluation and in the end, Defold was a no-brainer.

  1. It had the highest performance out of all five engines, which is critical when students are running games on Chromebooks.
  2. The feature set and platform support are awesome.
  3. The fast builds and hot reload feature really cut down on dev time.
  4. We love Lua and the message passing system. The small build size from removing dependencies is great.
    A few months ago, we began remaking the games from zero in Defold, and in just three months were able to finish all three and launch them on iOS, Android and MacOS, including localization in three languages.
    The games are called Desolation Farm, Lunar Crisis and Decision Diner.

Tech stack:

  • Cursor as our primary dev environment
  • Druid for UI
  • Google Analytics for Firebase SDK

We just kicked off a much larger, multiplayer project using Defold and Nakama, so I look forward to sharing that in the future!

11 Likes
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Wow, this is really great! I am impressed. Keep up the good work!

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These games are really good, congratulations. I very much enjoyed trying them out.
One thing though: the font used in “Desolation Farm” and “Lunar Crisis” is incredibly hard to read on a phone. At least for me. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
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Thanks for the feedback, Brigitte!

1 Like
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Congrats! I’m also using Defold for educational games and it makes my life a lot easier :smiley:

But I can’t wrap may head around using an external code editor! Feels weird going back and forth from Defold to run, or even worse, to debug! Defold’s editor may not be good at auto completion, but it certainly makes life easier when debugging! How do you handle that?

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In our experience, Cursor just has too many great features and extensions that speed up the coding process. Going back to the engine to build or hot reload isn’t a big deal compared to the time saved in the code editor.

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I think the VSCode Defold plugin lets you build and debug from VSCode. Maybe possible to create something similar for Cursor?

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I’m not sure I ever got to make it work properly, should try again…