You have one hour to explain Defold. What do you mention?

Questions
#1

Okay!

Last weekend I spent a lovely few hours in Barcelona’s “Nerd Quarter” trying to drum up interest for my game, Do Not Open This Suitcase. I got talking to a co-working space who asked me to do a workshop related to my game, including the app (which was, as you already know) built in Defold.

I explained my lack of experience with Defold, but they told me I could do and “introduction to…” type of thing. The target audience is people who work in the design sector, so some will have no coding experience, and others will have lots.

So… what are the most important ideas to explain to beginner users about defold? Message passing? The ability to create apps? Should I just spend one hour on ParticleFX?

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#2

My idea for the talk is to share the project file for my game bikiniverse, look at a few of the concepts of defold and lua, and then allow everyone to create a level, and play everyone’s levels at the end.

#3

Hey there!
There are many unique and intriguing aspects of Defold, it would be tough to cover them all!
In my personal opinion, I would find it to be very helpful to cover message passing. It is unique to the Defold engine, and not like anything that I have seen. I would also mention Collection Proxies, how to load them, enable them, etc. Depending on what your goal is, I would also talk about Library Dependencies. These can get a bit tricky sometimes, especially with more complex assets and dependencies. Some other things that I would touch on is the rendering process, ParticleFX, and the teamwork capability.
That may be a lot, but I really hope it helps.
Good luck on your venture!

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#4

I knew message passing would be the first thing to come up!

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#5

I agree with both of these whole-heartedly.

#6

I guess it depends on whether you are trying to “sell” Defold to people, or rather give people a hands-on intro tutorial where you explain difficult concepts.

If it’s more the first one, I recently did a survey among the community where I asked quite generally what people thought about Defold. For example, to the question “Out of Defold’s features, concepts, etc – which three do you value the most?”, the three which stood out from the others were 1) the amazing community, 2) it’s completely free, 3) performance/cross-platform aspects.

A lot can be said about 3, as well. Is it performance regarding the Defold user’s game development/workflow? In that case, Hot Reload, stable engine/editor and fast builds might be good things to mention. Performance regarding the games that are build? Then maybe the “no bloat” architecture, small build sizes are things worth pointing at.

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#7

Axel!!

that’s a very useful link! thanks so much.

It won’t be a very in-depth talk; firstly because I am in no way qualified to give such a talk, but also because it will be very short and I want to include a lot of practical elements. So, it will be a kind of sales pitch.

I would definitely like to at least mention a few of the things that higher-level users appreciate, though.

  • Excellent community of users and support from the Defold team
  • LUA and message passing
  • Adaptability (iOS, android, HTML5).
  • Hot Reload, stable engine/editor and fast builds, no bloat architecture, small build size.
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