Once I finish my book, I’m going to post about it in the general gamedev communities, and I’ll keep posting various resources to them over time. I’m planning to also include a link to Defold.com in the apps I publish on the credits screens, and I encourage any other developers to add a link to Defold’s site in their game to help push traffic here.
I’m wondering what kind of plans Defold team has for more outreach in the future? I would really like to see the community continue to grow, and more people with big projects adopting it for development.
@Oleg_The_Evangelist is traveling a lot on behalf of King and Defold. This year we have talked about Defold at GDC, CasualConnect, GMGC and GamesCom. We’ve also had a presence at several game jams (most recently Castle Game Jam). We have visited game dev schools and programs and Defold has also been used at a summer camp for kids here in Sweden which I thought was pretty cool. We have a couple of other initiatives as well, but I’ll let Oleg talk about those in case he wishes to add anything to my answer.
Thanks for the question! I feel at this point we indeed should tell more about what we’re doing. As I return from Gamescom I should do a proper blogpost on this, but here are few things to get you some context.
First about the concept of marketing. We’re not selling or buying anything, hence just marketing Defold to the world does not make much sense. King uses Defold internally and drives the development of the engine. Those devs worldwide who share similar values and/or care to make kind of games where Defold outshines everything else, are welcome to use Defold. So instead of actively marketing the engine, I am spending lots of time with teams who may benefit from using Defold.
And overall, a technology is worth as much, as are the games made with it. So e.g. we have a concept that we don’t participate in trade shows with a booth unless we can invite 3 to 5 Defold users to the booth to show their games. Like we’d buy a booth and invite teams there instead of decorating the booth with a Defold logo and spending time giving away stickers and t-shirts.
Regarding public efforts, Defold is all about teams, indies using the engine, not marketing. Even here at Gamescom we’re sponsoring the Gamejam instead of spending money on the booth.
We have multiple unannounced initiatives - educational, incentives to help indies soft-launch, we’re assembling partners to help young teams bring their innovative titles to the market and much more.
I haven’t highlighted my world tour and events I have spoken to, or all that sets of PR activities we did with the media, since this is more of a side product of the stuff above. We’re contributing to the industry, we’re building some new cool things. The success of teams using Defold is what matters.