from Hacker News

Defold: cross-platform game engine

by xd on 4/18/25, 8:15 AM with 172 comments

• by evv on 4/18/25, 10:50 AM

  They have gone with an interesting licensing solution here. I really appreciate that it is labeled as a source-available license instead of Open Source.

  https://defold.com/license/

  You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL). You can freely monetize games built with the engine, and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-switch.

  And finally, the reason why this is not Apache 2.0- you cannot monetize (forks of) the game engine itself.

  This seems fair and carefully considered. Kudos to the team!

• by progbits on 4/18/25, 10:51 AM

  Major props to them for not only calling it "source available" (and not trying to misuse "open source" like so many do), but also for highlighting the additions to their Apache-based license: https://defold.com/license/

• by tunaoftheland on 4/18/25, 12:39 PM

  I've had a soft spot for defold, partly because they're unique in the gamedev space. For example, the GUI editor that is built-in is done in Clojure! https://github.com/defold/defold/tree/dev/editor (cljfx for the GUI, I am rooting for seesaw though :))

  From what I understand it emerged from a gamedev studio from Sweden (King or something?) so there's commercial release pedigree there. I believe their console platform build/release tooling does cost money for game devs because the platform SDKs themselves impose restrictions. But I get the impression that defold as org does seem to put in earnest effort to be fair to game devs with licensing, etc. like others mentioned here.

• by rockyj on 4/18/25, 2:39 PM

  Defold has been there for a while, not sure of why this in on the front page right now. Anyways, Defold is good, the community, docs etc. are on the lower side as compared to Godot.

  The other options include MonoGame https://monogame.net/ (Stardew Valley was written in it) and of-course the biggies like Unity or Unreal. A lot depends on how much investment in learning one wants to make, what is the feature set one is looking for, the trade-offs or platforms one wants to keep in mind and which programming language / style one want to use.

• by bentt on 4/18/25, 1:10 PM

  I remember when Unity first appeared and what it felt like to read its materials, its pitch. It was like... whoa, this might actually be something.

  This feels similar. Sometimes you can just tell by the communications and the spirit of the language that the team has the goods.

  The fact that they have such comprehensive multiplatform export right now is big. One of Godot's biggest hurdles has been console support.

  My ONLY beef, from what I saw, was that it was Lua only. If it was C# I would have been more excited. But at least it's not a full C++ recompile like SOME engines. :)

• by magicalhippo on 4/18/25, 10:57 AM

  Related ongoing submission here[1], about a game with 60k LOC of Lua using this engine.

  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723088

• by nunodonato on 4/18/25, 10:55 AM

  I'd love to see a more in-depth comparison in terms of features with Godot. Seems the latter is much more advanced, at least in 3d capabitilies.

• by 2mlWQbCK on 4/18/25, 6:44 PM

  How does it compare to Löve 2D, other than shipping with a IDE? Looks like Defold supports more platforms, but I guess there are some strings attached since packaging games for various consoles usually come with very non-open dependencies.

  https://love2d.org/

• by Ralfp on 4/18/25, 11:00 AM

  I’ve used to follow this few years ago. This is a game engine created by King that they then set free after deinvesting from it themselves.

• by pk-protect-ai on 4/18/25, 2:27 PM

  Looking into the code ... Wow ... This is not C++, it is C with classes ... https://github.com/defold/defold/blob/dev/engine/dlib/src/dm... Any reasons to use these wrappers instead of modern C++ capabilities?

• by 383toast on 4/18/25, 2:21 PM

  Does anyone know if Defold can be used without the UI? Eg. just running it as a library or using scripting to do everything the game engine UI can do.

  Purpose is just to try to get an AI to generate code with it.

• by vlovich123 on 4/18/25, 11:57 AM

  Am I correctly understanding that this is a for-profit endeavor that’s relying solely on donations?

• by landsman on 4/18/25, 10:38 AM

  Scripting in Lua sounds good.

• by LichenStone on 4/18/25, 11:35 AM

  How does this compare to something like Godot?

• by synergy20 on 4/18/25, 2:26 PM

  is Teal widely used? https://github.com/teal-language/tl

  Teal to lua is what typescript to javascript

• by imzadi on 4/18/25, 2:19 PM

  I was curious about VR development, and after reading this, I'm still not sure: https://forum.defold.com/t/official-refold-stance-on-vision-...

• by tombert on 4/18/25, 9:09 PM

  Noticed it wasn't on Nixpkgs, so... https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/399843

• by Nijikokun on 4/18/25, 5:59 PM

  Defold is good, been around a very long time, but it's just rough around the edges, once you get used to it it's pretty smooth sailing though.

• by James-Bennet on 4/19/25, 1:47 AM

  I am looking for a game framework that allows interactive programming like LISP for browser games. So far I have tried love2d, TIC-80, and defold. Fennel (Clojure like language for Lua) works with love2d and TIC-80, but I could not get emacs repl to connect to TIC-80. Also I couldn't get Fennel to work with defold. Maybe there's a way I haven't found yet, but for now the only way to achieve interactive programming is to use love2d (love2d + fennel + emacs repl).

  https://vxlabs.com./2018/05/18/interactive-programming-with-... https://technomancy.us/188

• by zerr on 4/18/25, 3:14 PM

  Related: code-oriented C++ 2D game engine - Axmol Engine. It's an actively maintained Cocos2D-x fork: https://axmol.dev

• by rootnod3 on 4/19/25, 5:47 PM

  So, it mentions to support PS4/5 and Switch but doesn't mention FreeBSD? Both these platforms are FreeBSD based.

• by aaroninsf on 4/18/25, 5:04 PM

  Ask-HN:

  Context:

  Every time a game engine like this pops up I read through the comments noting other engines and various perspectives and criticisms (positive and negative).

  I have a game-like music composition project I want to pick back up. Media-intensive with a rich isometric/2D environment, with lots of little animations, which need to be synchronized to perfectly-scheduled audio events.

  I develop fully-feature prototypes in the past, most recently on iOS for iPad before there was iPadOS... but using Core libraries hit a performance wall on hardware of that era.

  Question:

  Who can I consult with up front to get good advice on what technology path to pursue, to realize my project?

  WebGL/Webasm would be fine. Cross-platform console targets would be fine. iPadOS would be fine and best, gestures are a core part of the vision.

  ...and I have no idea where and how to find my way into this.

  I follow some GameDev feeds and naturally what I read about is very capable application of engines/environments which are quite close to what I need, but which are (naturally) targetting game dev.

  Say you wanted to sit down and make a rich visual sequencer with some DAW-like features? What's the right approach?

  It's not a traditional DAW, it's much more about a rich tiled game-like UX; it's not a game, with levels, maps, and such... it's got elements of both. The audio engine needs to be DAW-level, but, synchronized to graphical elements and UX and responsive to gesture in a way that's like game-level.

  Any ideas welcome. I think I have a good (layperson's) understanding of the overal architecture I need; but I don't know how my conceptual map translates into different styles of game-engine or more general media-engines.

  My hunch is my "solodev" state which was a blocker before when I had no time to quit the day job and learn eg. OpenGL for iOS, is significantly ameliorated today by code assistants... iff they are familiar with <the engine/platform>

  Do Claude Code etc. know Unity dev? Engines like this one? I don't know! Naive.

  Haaaaalp

• by vednig on 4/18/25, 3:08 PM

  A game engine that's opensource and supports Linux. Love it

• by amarant on 4/19/25, 6:48 AM

  In terms of maturity, how does this compare to Godot?

• by bk496 on 4/19/25, 9:46 AM

  How many of these are there?

• by shmerl on 4/18/25, 8:11 PM

  How does it compare to Godot?

• by sylware on 4/18/25, 10:30 AM

  Hopefully their build scripts are sane for native elf/linux support:

  * -static-libgcc (-static-libstdc++ if c++).

  * glibc ABI selection, see binutils documentation, VERSION related page, the second part of this page. This must include the glibc internal symbols. It easy to check the proper ABI with tools like readelf (the VERSION name part), which will tell you everything.

  * dynamic loading with fallbacks of all system interface shared libs.

  That said, it is exactly the same for the other OSes, this is all about abstraction via tables of functions.

• by zenkey on 4/18/25, 10:45 AM

  After spending time with Cursor/Junie/Copilot etc., game engines are starting to feel slow and behind the curve. I’d love to see faster adoption and deeper LLM integration (as native features, not just some random third-party plugins). Whoever builds the first “Cursor for games” is going to disrupt the market.