Glossary

Defold

Defold is a cross-platform game engine known for its lightweight and efficient design, ideal for creating both 2D and 3D games.

What Is Defold?

Defold is a free game engine developed by King. It’s designed to offer a streamlined and efficient development experience. This engine provides a comprehensive set of tools for creating games across multiple platforms such as desktop, mobile, and the web. 

It stands out for its ease of use, powered by a component-based architecture and a Lua scripting language. That’s why Defold is so accessible for both beginners and experienced developers. 

The engine’s focus on performance and resource management ensures that developers can build and launch games for various devices.

Benefits of Defold

Since Defold has a lightweight nature, it requires less memory and processing power. Accordingly, it can offer faster performance and reduced loading times. 

The engine’s cross-platform capabilities allow developers to write code once and deploy it across multiple platforms, saving time and resources. 

Defold’s active community and open-source model provide a wealth of resources, tutorials, and plugins. Meanwhile, its robust debugging tools and efficient asset management system streamline the development process and allow developers to focus on innovation.

Key Features of Defold

  • Free game engine with free source code access.
  • Lightweight engine for efficient performance
  • Cross-platform deployment on desktop, mobile, and web
  • Component-based architecture for flexible game design
  • Lua scripting for easy and efficient coding
  • Built-in editor with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality
  • Efficient asset management system
  • Strong community support with extensive resources

Who Should Use Defold

Defold is ideal for independent developers, small studios, and hobbyists looking to create high-quality games with limited resources. 

This engine’s simplicity and efficiency make it a great choice for developers new to game design, while its robust features cater to the needs of experienced developers working on complex projects. 

Defold’s focus on 2D game development makes it especially suitable for developers creating mobile and web-based games. 

Defold and Incredibuild

Incredibuild enhances Defold by accelerating the game development process through distributed computing. By integrating Incredibuild with Defold, developers can offload heavy computational tasks, such as asset processing and build compilation, across multiple machines. 

This parallel processing capability reduces build times and helps with faster iteration cycles.