Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine | Hacker News Reader

iOS game engine

defold.com

63 pointsundantag44 comments

Would be nice to see some examples of completed games on the site, even if they're just YouTube walk throughs.

There are two examples in the docs, a side scrolled and a platformer.

I saw those as I spelunked the docs, but I'd like to see something more full fat and playable.

We will add more content as soon as we can.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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. :)

Thank you for the clarification :)

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!

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.

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.

I can see the benefit of having a single codebase, but how would this fare against the likes of Unity, where the optimal backend is used for each platform?

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?...

I've been looking for something like this for a while... I'm writing an application that I want to have run on PCs as well as my Raspberry Pi (using Python preferably, although C++ is always an option), and eventually, I'd love to be able to port it to Android (+WP/iOS/BB/whatever else) as well. I'm still at the deciding state, obviously, as this is not a common thing for some reason. However, I'd love to use Python, so I'm comfortable with just having PCs and an RPi for now - but that still begs the question, is it possible to create an application (using restricted OpenGL calls) that works with both OpenGL full and ES systems without modification?

kivy ? http://kivy.org/#home

I'm working on one of those. Beta SDK should be out soon too: http://multiplay.io

Unity3D is pretty much just that.

Moai?

http://getmoai.com/

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!

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

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.

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.)

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

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!

No mention of multiplayer support is worrying.

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

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

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.

There's a screenshot on their twitter of a nexus 7 running the engine, so presumably it will be available soon.

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

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

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.

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. :)

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

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

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

First of all, it couldn't possibly be illegal.

Second, apparently Apple now allow interpreters, just not JITs.

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

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

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