
Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine - undantag
http://www.defold.com/
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teh_klev
Would be nice to see some examples of completed games on the site, even if
they're just YouTube walk throughs.

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brendanobrien
I agree, but think the issue is slightly deeper. The branding lays the sass /
pass / social elements on a little too thick for my taste. I immediately get
the sense that this software is limited compared to a 'hard core' game engine.
I'm sure that's not the case, but the visuals seem to belie this.

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ragnarsvensson
Very true, we wanted the web design to welcome people not accustomed to game
dev, but we might have pushed it a bit too far. The software is surprisingly
unlimited in what you can do with it, it's basically a very fast generic
simulator of interactive real-time applications. It makes very few assumptions
about your games. E.g. you can script the rendering pipeline exactly as you
want it and update it in real-time while the game is running on your phone.
The live update stuff works for almost every asset, scripts, shaders, etc.

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socialist_coder
For 2d games the feature set of this engine seems pretty solid. You get a
particle engine, tile map editor, physics + easy to use collision shape
editor, good font support, plus a nice IDE to visually setup your game. And,
it's behavior/component based (like Unity), which is a great architecture for
games.

But, what about accessing other iPhone functionality like the camera roll or
in-app purchase? The docs don't seem to make any mention of it. Can you write
native code plugins?

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ragnarsvensson
We currently don't have any support for this, but we plan to add the ability
of user extensions in C++. We want to include it in the service so the
extensions get compiled by our servers for every platform - so other people in
your team can start using them, regardless of if you run the same OS or not.
It should also be combined with editor-plugins.

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dualogy
No in-game screenshots? There should be 100s of them, with a JS carousel
highlighting the 5 pretties ones... tsk, tsk.

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ragnarsvensson
Good point, we should show plenty more things on the site. The problem right
now is that we are so fresh that we have little content to show. As people
start releasing their games we will add screenshots.

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neya
It would be interesting to see someone compare this with the Unity Game
engine. Also I think there should be atleast a handful of screenshots on their
website, to give their prospective users an idea of what it looks like, before
downloading.

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ragnarsvensson
Thanks for the feedback, we obviously need to improve the amount of info on
the site. I would say the biggest pros compared to Unity is that you can
change your games while they run on your mobile devices, without needing to
rebuild/restart which gives an iteration-cycle of about 1 second. We have also
specialized the toolset of 2D (tiled graphics etc), but the engine is 3D
behind the scenes. We are a service so the pricing is completely different.
The biggest con is of course that Unity has been around for much longer so
they have a bigger feature set, larger community and proven technology. But we
will get there in time. :)

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neya
Thank you for the clarification :)

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stripe
The pitch itself is bad. What is your slogan? Tools like a pro or something
for digital rebels? No screenshots of nothing? Not even a demo game? No
disarming arguments why I should lock myself into your closed source
middleware? Better: use Moai (open source, can fix bugs on your own, can add
features, etc.) with Testflight (ios only I guess). I really do not know who
the target audience is for this product. Too expensive (3 seats 150$/MO, lol)
for newcomers (the video is surely targeted at those) but missing meat for
'real pros' - yo!

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ragnarsvensson
Great feedback, thanks! We have almost solely focused on making the best
workflow for game dev possible, with things like updating the games live on
your mobile phones while they run and a proper editor with visual editing. I
really agree that we are currently sending a mixed message, we need to be more
clear of what kind of service we are and what you can do with it.

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mtgx
Someone should make an OpenGL ES 3.0 engine that works on all of these
platforms by default: Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS/WebGL (or Native Client, at
least). I think it would be very popular in a year or two. I've been enjoying
indie "mobile" games for PC's a lot more than AAA type games lately, because
they are easy to get into and fun. They seem to focus more on game-play than
"regular" PC game developers do.

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eddie_the_head
libGDX[1][2] (it's not an engine) is a great cross-platform Java library that
allows you target the desktop (Win/Mac/Linux/etc), Android, HTML5 (through
GWT), and now iOS all with the same codebase, built on standards like OpenGL
ES/WebGL.

Mario Zechner (the main guy behind libGDX) wrote an excellent book[3] last
year on Android gamedev that has you start from the basics up to creating your
own game engine and games.

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/libgdx/>

[2] <https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx>

[3]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430230428/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430230428/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1430230428&linkCode=as2&tag=mymainsite-20)

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sicher
I've been working with this engine for some time and it really shows that
these game industry veterans know what they are doing. It's a delight to use!

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eropple
How does it differ from Marmalade or any of the other Lua-based game engines?

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sicher
I haven't used Marmalade, but after browsing through their site it looks like
it's an SDK that you code against through Visual Studio or XCode.

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eropple
Marmalade has Lua bindings as well. Maybe a better example would have been
Moai (I think that was what I was originally thinking but got my wires
crossed).

(There are a number of game engines out there that say "here, write all your
stuff in Lua!". I find they're generally a bad fit for the projects I work on
because I expect a level of structure in my work environment that is actively
difficult to build with any of the ones I've seen. Always looking, though,
because rewriting the universe sucks.)

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malkia
Make games like a Pro? What are these folks smoking?

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chmu
We are currently in a public beta phase. We are aware of that the web-site is
really lacking a lot of information but we've been focusing on the product.
Please post your questions here <http://defold.userecho.com> and we'll try to
answer as quick as we can. It's also possible to post privately there.

Thanks!

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hayksaakian
No mention of multiplayer support is worrying.

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ragnarsvensson
We currently have no exposed network support, but that will come at a later
time.

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yjh0502
It seems that it does not support Android target yet. I can't find Android
support in its homepage & editor.

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LukaD
The only mention of Android Google could find is here:
<http://www.defold.com/ref/render#render.enable_state>

But it seems like as always Android is not being treated like a first class
citizen.

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klrr
Can someone give me more technical info instead of their propaganda video?

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epaga
Don't know much yet, but: their editor is Eclipse-based. The scripts are Lua-
based and can be cross-compiled.

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huhtenberg
Somewhat offtopic - the logo has a strong correlation with the Adidas mark.
This may cause you a headache further down the road, perhaps sooner than you
realize.

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ragnarsvensson
Hehe, a few of us thought that too once we had the logo in-place. We hoped no
one else would make that association, we were obviously wrong. :) Another fun
fact, our favicon on the site is almost identical to the new Microsoft logo,
but we had it first. :)

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bbayer
What is the pros/cons against similar product like
<http://www.giderosmobile.com/>

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cmwelsh
Is this actually legal on iOS? I thought the App Store banned Lua code from
being retrieved and executed on demand over the Internet.

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stripe
For a release the lua code is surely translated into objective-c, so lua is
'just' used as a scripting language.

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gte910h
Wonder if it supports git instead of their server if desired.

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seivan
"Zip files through email"? Really, people still do that?

