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Defold: 2D Game Engine by King.com
- brudgers 11y agoI found the previous discussion interesting because it shows how far this project has come over the last few years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791284
- aplummer 11y agoI'm really interested if anyone has advice on the best cross platform 2d focused game engine?
- alanfalcon 11y agoI've liked Corona SDK, though multiple recent ownership changes does leave me uneasy. The creators of Crashlands swear by Game Maker, but I wouldn't go there if you have any kind of programming experience already as the UI will just be in your way all the time. While Unity is accepted as best for 3D, many devs love it for 2D with the right libraries.
- Kaali 11y agoUnity is the most popular engine at the moment. Saying that it is the best is going a bit far. I actually think that Unity is one of the best 2D engines available. For 3D the tools are really broken for production use, and Unity is quite unresponsive about fixing them. And the renderer quality is a bit of a far cry from CryEngine or Unreal Engine, but is getting there bit by bit. Except that those two are also progressing, mostly by doing actual new research in the field. Still, new 2D engines are welcome as Unity still has the 3D package to work with in a 2D game.
- Mikeb85 11y agoGodot is great. Full editor, it has it's own 2D bone animation system(!), own scripting language (very easy to pick up - Python-esque with simple semantics - you can program in it without really knowing it because there's not much to know) and it deploys to pretty much every target you can think of (it's written in C++ with very few dependencies).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- aplummer 11y agoThanks for the input peops
- imaginenore 11y agoUnity.
- SvenAndersson 11y agoMy answer will of course be biased, since I work on Defold. But if you are going for a 2D game, I think Defold is a really good choice. We support Android, iOS, desktop (Win, OSX and Linux) and HTML5. We try to solve all the icky platform specific stuff for you. And to start coding you only need to download the editor, there is no development environment to set up. Are you doing fancy 3D stuff, then Unity will probably be better, currently. :)
- noamsml 11y agoWhere's the redirect to some app store bullshit after 5 seconds? Never buying or using anything from those sleazeballs, and you should follow suit.
- smaili 11y agoWhat's with the animosity? There seems to have been a lot of effort put into Defold, the least you could do is appreciate the fact it's been made available free of charge and royalties.
- JayHost 11y agoThe Why are you releasing Defold free? section basically says because "You guys can work making our software better for us for free" Also you need a Google account to use it.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoI don't really wanna defend King.com, but I think you're being a bit uncharitable. They talk about the community "creating tutorials, by finding bugs, improving the documentation". It's just tautological that you'll get more bug reports the more users you have, and creating tutorials/refining documentation are particularly suited to crowdsourcing (as the designers are often too close to the application to understand what a newbie needs to know).
- JayHost 11y ago"I don't really wanna defend King.com" Sure. I cherry picked the negative because of this. There are too many game engines that are made for special purpose studios (People who have experience with them) I think there are a lot better GPL'd engines people should use so the community benefits; not Candy Trademark king King.com Particularly Libgdx; Blender3d ; Godot Now that I think about it game engines are a bit like Linux Distros in that all the options possibly dilutes the greater purpose.
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- keypusher 11y agoSeems nice. Apparently the scripting is in Lua.
- svisser 11y agoYou need a Google account to use Defold? Right off the bat things are heading in the wrong direction.
- boondaburrah 11y agoUnfortunately it bakes in analytics that feed data back to King, not even you. Basically they're getting you to do the dirty work of getting them more entries in their customer tracking databases without them having to even make another Whale Acquisition Saga. Also you're not in control of your own source code. It's stored on King's servers. I'm not trusting them with my shit.
- alanfalcon 11y ago"Not even you" Is contradicted by the marketing copy: "Analytics built in with zero setup help you keep track of your game." I'm all for exposing the true motivations at play here, but please keep things factual.
- boondaburrah 11y agoSorry, I was going based off of what I remember from last year when I swore it off. Hopefully they'll allow you to disable it completely, but there was no way when I checked (again, last year). The fact that it's even there rubs me the wrong way.
- sicher 11y agoIt is an analytics service that you can choose to use or not to use - it's totally up to you. If you don't use it no data is gathered from your users. (Currently it's off by default and you have to explicitly turn it on.) Check out out FAQ and EULA at http://www.defold.com http://www.defold.com (I work for Defold)
- a_imho 11y ago>Currently it's off by default and you have to explicitly turn it on. As others have said, the fact that it is included is worrying and a reason I would not even test drive, however promising it looks, sorry. Also, opting in for analytics means implicitly opting in for marketing and promotions per the linked site: "marketing and promotion of our Services or related products, for example sending communications (including by email) for these purposes on our, or a third party's behalf. If you do not want us to use your data in this way please let us know by contacting us at: info@defold.com; " shady I don't know about Defold, but I'm getting lots of emails lately that goes like, hi customers, we changed our privacy policies and toc, make sure you read the hundred pages the following link and notice the subtle changes in wording without us providing a diff or breakdown. It is this easy to change default behaviour.
- kin 11y agoBuild once deploy anywhere to six different platforms sounds too good to be true. Code existing on King servers sounds super sketchy. I do like that you script in Lua, which is pretty standard in gaming. Still, I'm probably going to stay away from early adopting this.
- Drinkandcode 11y agoOr give it a try (hey, a free software with decent tutorials that doesn't require install/deploy) and return with a facts-based feedback ;-)
- ebbv 11y agoConsidering these guys tried to trademark the word Candy, among other questionable actions, I don't think I'd use/trust anything they offer.
- biot 11y agoWhy is that questionable? They made a very popular game and, as happens with profitable apps, a ton of developers fire up their clone factories and start creating Candy Crash, Candy Mush, Candy Squeeze, Candy Crush HD, and any other name they can think of in order to cause confusion in the market and cash in on their efforts. Isn't this kind of thing exactly what trademark law was designed to protect against? Keep in mind that to trademark something you need to narrowly define the scope in which the trademark applies. So places selling actual candy or those using the word candy not in a computer game would be completely unaffected.
- joosters 11y agoAre you suggesting that no other games used the word 'candy' in their title prior to Candy Crush? All those developers would suddenly be hit by this trademark, and would be forced to rename their pre-existing games, unless they can afford to lose money on some expensive lawyers.
- biot 11y agoPrior use is a defense against a trademark claim. Yes, it may involve lawyers to enforce that right, but the reality of the business world is that if you have a name you want protected, then you register for a trademark of that name (and if you don't get it, pick another name). Otherwise, be prepared to have to fight for it if someone registers the name you're using after you had the opportunity to do so but didn't.
- nacs 11y agoBecause King's Candy Crush is a ripoff/clone of Candy Swipe.. http://metro.co.uk/2014/02/13/candy-crush-saga-makers-to-sue-game-they-copied-4303096/ http://metro.co.uk/2014/02/13/candy-crush-saga-makers-to-sue...
- Doolwind 11y agoI've spent some time prototyping with Defold and found it a joy to work with. The write once run anywhere is great but the real power comes from live changes. You can edit code while the game is running and see live changes. Iterations taking a few seconds (even on target platform) is a huge win for game devs. I'd recommend checking it out as an alternative to Unity if you are making a 2D game.
- Drinkandcode 11y agoThis is an ambitious statement =] But yes, the engine at the current state may be decent for certain use cases. We're working to make it better, obviously. Give it a try at a game jam neat you. Or at the upcoming Ludum Dare.
- kartan 11y agoDisclaimer: I'm a developer at King. I work with "Fiction Factory" other of King's internal engines. We had some weeks ago an internal presentation by the CTO and the Defold team. They explained their goals for doing it. The goals, as I remember them, to give Defold for free are: * To improve Defold. The bigger the user base the more stable, relevant and useful it will be the product. * To show people that King is a technology company. We do cool stuff. * To be able to hire developers that already know our tech stack. The first point is the most important one. What have helped to grow other engines has been a community of users that have helped to improve them in features and stability. Some times users help open source engines like Ogre3D, others they help paid engines like Unity3D. We think that King can offer a win-win situation with a free (like in free beer) engine with exciting features in exchange of a community that uses it and makes it relevant. This ideas are in the box titled "Why are you releasing Defold free?" at the bottom of the site. If you want to read them from an official source.
- conceit 11y agoAren't king the copy cats doing candy crush, ripping off a lone dev? "We do cool stuff", yeah, no.
- Ace17 11y agoIt's marketed as "free". Is it like "free beer", or "free speech"?
- SolarNet 11y agoFree beer. They even try a switch-a-roo by putting a super positive spin on "free" and then doing a "(as in free beer!)".
- jbverschoor 11y agoHow does this compare to cocos?
- Drinkandcode 11y agoWe've (we=some of the Defold core team) spent a good time with a bunch of Cocos2D core devs at GDC. Each tech has strong sides and features in development. Currently Defold is a young free tech mostly used at King. But this improves at a pace of a solid couple of hundreds per day.
- xedarius 11y agoFeels like King come up against a significant wall of resentment when they do anything, perhaps some of it justified some of it not so much. Defold seems like a nice idea. As with any games engine it's never about the quality of the engine but the asset pipeline you put in front of it (see Unreal engine for a grade A example of this). I didn't see much talk about the asset pipeline, I see people from King are around, anyone care to comment?
- Drinkandcode 11y agoYes. So King uses the engine internally, right? The tech is driven by the Blossom Blast Saga team and by another 5 internal teams using the engine. In fact, the engine team and the games team reside in a same room, and are isolated to a separate building from the other teams. A close collaboration in a very productive environment. From where I am ;-) Oh.. so the art/assets pipeline is pretty much dictated by the internal teams. But feel free to use the engine and explain on Defold forums of the good and the bad. We'll be happy to listen.
- SvenAndersson 11y agoOoops, missed this question, sorry for the late reply. :) The asset pipeline is not as customizable as one could wish for in it's current form, but something that will change with the upcoming new editor. In honesty, we haven't had a lot of requests in this regard in-house yet, but if this is something that is highly requested by indie users we will surely look into this. (Hold tight, going into a bit of a tangent below.) We put a lot of effort into performance, keeping the binaries small and having fast development iteration. One very nifty thing is that the build/pipeline can be run as command line command, without even opening the editor, which enables you to setup your own build command in Sublime Text or on a build bot for example... (I have something like this at home where I can code in Sublime, hit Ctrl+B and it will build with the same code as the editor and automatically launch the game, all from inside my favorite code editor. Just imagine how sweet this will be when the pipeline/engine is a bit more extendable. :)) Yet another cool thing of course is being able to hot reloading resources while the game is running, also tying into the fast development iterations. Hope this at least answers some of your questions. :)
- ingenieros 11y ago@SvenAndersson Are there any plans to make the GUI feel and look more native on OS X?
- SvenAndersson 11y agoWe are working on a new editor, a total rebuild (dropping Eclipse), which will also have a much better GUI/look. It will also enable extendability of the editor and pipeline. It will have a unified look across all platforms though, but I would believe it's a bit more "OS X like" compared to the old Eclipse stuff. In short, it will look a bit more modern than the current one. :)
- ingenieros 11y agoAwesome, looking forward to it!
- nacs 11y agoDoes this mean you'll be using QT for your cross-platform GUI?
- SvenAndersson 11y agoFor the new editor we are using JavaFX i believe.
- nixarn 11y agoI got a couple questions for the devs behind it. We've also looked a bit to at it, we're a cocos2d studio, but thinking of moving to cocos2dx or unity for future projects, and ofcourse Defold is an interesting alternative as well. My questions are 1. Can you extend the engine with any missing features. Two example cases: If we want to use some iOS specific feature that Defold my default doesn't support. Or if we'd wanted to implement Spriter support (instead of Spine). 2. Can you write your own shaders? Only thing I could find on it, is some tinting stuff, but that's not enough. Thanks for releasing the engine for free and keeping it 2D focused!
- sicher 11y ago1. If you can build it in Lua, yes. We are working on low level extensions but that will happen some time in the future. 2. Absolutely! We haven't got any good tutorial yet but you have full access to shaders.
- fit2rule 11y agoJust wanted to say, don't forget to look at MOAI: http://getmoai.com/ http://getmoai.com/ Your questions reminded me of the prominent 'yes' in the case of the MOAI framework ..
- sicher 11y agoHere's a demo written in Defold. Lots of shaders! :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ij7louE670 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ij7louE670
- stevebmark 11y agoThe demo on the first tutorial page (http://dashboard.defold.com/projects/16850/tutorial/0 http://dashboard.defold.com/projects/16850/tutorial/0) is majorly broken, including styles and with dozens of console errors. Interesting project to keep an eye on, not ready for the spotlight yet though.
- SvenAndersson 11y agoI heard that there were problems with the tutorial on the dashboard, the one on the main site should work better; http://www.defold.com/tutorials/getting-started/ http://www.defold.com/tutorials/getting-started/
- sicher 11y agoThanks. Check out that tutorial through the main page at http://www.defold.com/tutorials/getting-started/ http://www.defold.com/tutorials/getting-started/ Should work better.
- garid0s 11y agoA very cool talk on the Clojure tech behind the tooling of the engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajX09xQ_UEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajX09xQ_UEg
- SvenAndersson 11y agoThis is the new upcoming editor, but still very interesting!
- grogenaut 11y agowtf is with the huge terms and conditions?
- _jmar777 11y agoSurprised by all the vitriol in this thread. Defold looks awesome. Maybe I just haven't tracked King closely enough in the past to have developed the community knee jerk reaction here, but this seems like a cool move.