Thinking of sticking around, but...I have some worries

Questions
#1

So a little history. I’ve been into game development for around 14 years, only the past 2 years have I been trying to get serious. I have used basically every engine or framework you can think of that’s at least well known to semi-well known. In the past 2 years I’ve worked on some pretty cool stuff, from an html5/mobile battle RPG that gets it’s data from a server (which I also built myself with node.) To a shoot 'em up with procedurally generated levels and rpg elements, to basically 2D Skyrim. I didn’t finish any of them for various reasons.

So I’ve messed with Defold a little, mostly with the tutorial stuff I haven’t really tried to create anything cool with it. But I like the mix of low-level and high-level. That’s why I keep coming back. I’m really looking for a language and tool I can stick to for a long time and really master it. I have a few worries though.

How good is it with networking?
Can it do procedural generation well?
If I have gigantic tilemaps (such as with procedural generation) can the engine handle that well?
Will the engine be abandoned, and if it does, will it go open source so we can still keep using it?
I worry that large projects will get messy and unwieldly

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#2

There is no need to worry. After trying a lot of engines out there, i also feel that defold is the best for 2d games among them.

Feel free to proceed, and you’ll realise that defold is easy to learn and master, and mind it, it’s really addictive. :grinning:
As for your questions,

I have never used Defold for networking, but there are a lot of solutions out there. Colyseus (pardon my spelling) for example is a very good networking solution, that allows your game to communicate with a custom built node js backend. Moreover Defold does support Playfab for networking too.

I made a game that used procedural generation an year ago, and i must admit that Defold performs awesome when it comes to procedural generation. There is also a thread here

Big tilemaps should not be a problem, as long as they are not so big that they interfere with floating point precision, which is present in every engine. But still there are ways that they can be solved too.

I remember someone asking this question some time ago. But as @britzl replied, “Defold is here to stay”. So, no need to worry, just buckle up and get started with developing some cool games. Is you ever get stuck, we are always here to help😀

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#3

Defold supports HTTP and HTTPS, TCP, UDP and WebSocket communication, either natively or using extensions. Defold supports a number of different backend systems.

Learn more here: https://defold.com/manuals/networking/

Not sure what you’re referring to specifically here. There are multiple solutions for random numbers. Lua is a dynamic language that lends itself well to runtime creation of randomly created data structures. You can modify tilemaps and spawn objects at runtime. That’s all the building blocks I feel are necessary to have to create games with randomly generated content. Are you thinking of something else?

A huge tilemap is always going to be a problem regardless of engine. You need to use a solution where you don’t have all of it loaded at once and only have chunks of it in memory at once. This is s standard approach to large open worlds. I have an examples of this kind of large procedural tilemap here: https://github.com/britzl/publicexamples/tree/master/examples/infinite_map

No it will not be abandoned. And if it would I would fight for it to become open source.

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#4

Sounds good, thanks for the replies. :smiley: I think I’ll make a prototype and see what I think.

2 Likes