Defold is interesting. I’ve used it for a game jam and went through the Zenva courses for it. So I have a little experience, but please correct me if what I’m about to say is wrong.

I like defold but it has problems that pushed me to Love2D. For one, the distinction between a game object and a collection feels unnecessary and because they have slight variations (like how to get their message url) it lead to some confusion I couldn’t get over.

Furthermore, the message based system is odd to me. In theory I love it, but in practice I just couldn’t find a good way to keep things organized. I ended up with a spaghetti mess of messages that I could never keep track of. But that’s likely a me-being-a-shitty-programmer problem.

I do love the performance and tiny export sizes though! Getting builds that small and that performant from Lua is pretty sweet.

I haven't used it that much (never even done a jam with it). The weird licensing of the editor rubs me the wrong way, and IIRC it even has some telemetry enabled by default. That's kind of a red flag when you consider the engine came from King, a mobile game developer. I don't think I want to trust them, but other people might not care.

But I do like the design of the engine. Message passing is actually a great pattern in general, and it's used by other engines like O3DE to great effect. It does take some getting used to though, and I personally never was a fan of Lua. If you've ever done any Objective C or Swift, it'll be familiar. It provides a way to build decoupled systems effortlessly, and long-term keeps your codebase flexible and maintainable, which is exactly what you want for a game that needs to constantly evolve its design throughout development.

Full agree with the licensing and connection to king being dubious. They’re now under the Defold foundation FWIW. Either way, I tried it, and moved on.

I think I’ll be messing with Raylib and C next. I’m already noticing some issues with Lua and Love2D as well that I don’t love. Mostly web builds being a royal PITA.

I kinda get what they are saying. They want an intuitive template with good documentation. Most Unity and Unreal templates are like "here you go" with no real direction or instruction on how to use them. Or, like they said, the template is folders of folders, layers of layers.

Im sure these exist, but the more useful something is, the higher the price. I dont pay for templates, so I get what is available for free.

Are you looking for a framework or a game engine? You talk about frameworks in the post but it sounds like you actually want something that does everything for you, which is more in line with engines. There are a lot of 2D engines out there like Godot, Unity, GameMaker etc. that are all pretty easy to use.

From my perspective it's a matter of scale. I've worked with "things" that are bare bones like OpenGL and Direct X, and complete (but old) like Unreal 2.5. I'm using the terms interchangably to mean "something that has covered the nuts and bolts of game development so I can focus on customizations and the actual game development, and leverages my skills as a programmer, while being as quick to get started on as possible"

So any solution, from a generic project in eclipse/vs code using pre defined libraries (as long as when I hit compile there is a player character I can move about) to a custom program that shows me a level editor with scripts I can attach to "pawns" are acceptable levels of soutions.

Unreal 2.5 is so old

Hey, I also had a look at Unity in 2015, which is where my opinion comes from.

Oh god, I'm old. You might as well have said

youtube.com/watch?v=LfQ-Xg_MS3…

... that metalocalypse reference is almost 20 years old.

Good thing I'm going to the doctors tomorrow to learn more about my borderline glaucoma and how it might relate to my blood pressure issues.

I'm fucking old man 👴😭

Grandpa's Guitars

^YouTube