I started evaluating Defold this past weekend and I have been very impressed.
The developer experience is very similar to Godot, especially if you work on your scripts with external editors. Everything that has to do with building and running the app is faster than Godot though.
Initial builds with Defold are very fast, it has on demand hotreload, and very small binary sizes. The small binary size makes it well suited for working on web games.
The Godot Editor is still a tad bit nicer to use, but I do like the fact that the Defold editor is written in Clojure. I imagine it makes extending it fairly quick.
The main reason I see myself sticking with Defold over Godot is because scripting is done in Lua.
The Lua ecosystem has a lot history in the game dev space making it easy to search for answers. Lua is trivial to extend and has multiple statically typed options that compile to it. Notable statically typed languages are Typescript and Haxe. Also Lua has a lot practical use in many domains outside of the Defold editor unlike GDScripts lock-in to Godot.
Defold has no where near the size of the community of Godot, but the developers seem very active on the forum and GitHub.
I need to play around with it more before I’m 100% sold. Both Godot and Defold are great looking choices for 2D.
The developer experience is very similar to Godot, especially if you work on your scripts with external editors. Everything that has to do with building and running the app is faster than Godot though.
Initial builds with Defold are very fast, it has on demand hotreload, and very small binary sizes. The small binary size makes it well suited for working on web games.
The Godot Editor is still a tad bit nicer to use, but I do like the fact that the Defold editor is written in Clojure. I imagine it makes extending it fairly quick.
The main reason I see myself sticking with Defold over Godot is because scripting is done in Lua.
The Lua ecosystem has a lot history in the game dev space making it easy to search for answers. Lua is trivial to extend and has multiple statically typed options that compile to it. Notable statically typed languages are Typescript and Haxe. Also Lua has a lot practical use in many domains outside of the Defold editor unlike GDScripts lock-in to Godot.
Defold has no where near the size of the community of Godot, but the developers seem very active on the forum and GitHub.
I need to play around with it more before I’m 100% sold. Both Godot and Defold are great looking choices for 2D.