Defold

What is Defold?

Defold is a 2D game engine that was built inside King, the mobile giant behind Candy Crush Saga, to power its own titles. King released it to the public in 2016, open sourced the code in 2020, and handed stewardship to the independent Defold Foundation, so today it is free for everyone, including commercial use.

The engine is deliberately small and fast. The editor downloads in moments, projects compile in seconds, and the resulting game bundles are tiny compared to other engines, which is a huge advantage for mobile and web distribution.

Defold is a traditional editor-based engine: you build scenes out of game objects and components, and you write game logic in Lua, a small and friendly scripting language. The architecture is clean and data-driven, and the official documentation is famously thorough, with a full tutorial series that takes you from zero to a published game.

Key Features

• Fast, lightweight editor that runs on modest hardware
• Lua scripting with a well-designed component API
• Data-driven scene and collection architecture
• Built-in physics, particles, sound and sprite animations
• Live reload and hot-reload during development
• One-click publishing to desktop, mobile, web and consoles
• Tiny build sizes ideal for mobile and web games
• Free forever, with the source available on GitHub

How to get started

Download the Defold editor from defold.com and create a free account. The editor opens straight into a welcome screen with example projects, and the official docs include a step-by-step tutorial that builds a complete platformer game.

The workflow is different from most engines: everything is a game object with components, and scenes are composed by placing objects in collections. Once you get used to thinking in objects and messages, it feels refreshingly simple. The Defold community forum is active and the team answers questions directly.

• Download the Defold editor and create an account
• Open the platformer tutorial in the docs
• Build your first scene with game objects and sprites
• Write a little Lua to control your character
• Publish to web or mobile from the editor's build menu

Use cases

• 2D mobile games with small download sizes
• Web games running in the browser via HTML5 export
• Hyper-casual titles built and shipped quickly
• Puzzle, platformer and arcade games of every stripe
• Games targeting consoles with the official extensions
• Prototypes and game jam entries that must run anywhere

Pricing and licensing

Defold is free to use for any purpose, including commercial games, with no royalties and no revenue thresholds. The editor, the engine and all official services cost nothing, and the source code is available under the source-available Defold License on GitHub.

The project is sustained by the Defold Foundation and by partner extensions. Console exports are handled through official extensions that may involve agreements with the platform holders, but the engine itself stays free. For most developers the answer is simple: Defold costs nothing.

Pros and cons

Defold's strengths are its speed, its stability and its honest simplicity. The engine is production-proven by King, the tooling is fast even on weak laptops, builds are tiny, and the documentation is excellent, so you spend your time making games rather than fighting tooling.

The trade-offs: the community is smaller than the big engines, so fewer tutorials and third-party assets exist, and Lua, while lovely, is less familiar to many developers than C# or JavaScript. The visual feature set is deliberately 2D-focused, so Defold is not the choice for ambitious 3D.

Alternatives

• Godot: free and open source with strong 2D and 3D tools
• GameMaker: 2D-first engine with drag-and-drop and GML
• Cocos Creator: lightweight engine popular for mobile and web
• Flame: 2D engine built on Flutter with Dart
• Love2D: minimal open-source 2D framework using Lua