Defold vs Unity - game engines comparison

Defold is a small game engine not only in terms of popularity, but also in size! When and where could it be better than one of the best engines out there - Unity?

This comparison focuses on Defold vs Unity, but could be also applicable to a comparison between Defold and any other 3D plug-and-play game engine, as it focuses on fields where Defold shines the most in comparison to bigger and perhaps more clunkier solutions. While it's focuses on showing Defold in a good light, bear in mind it has totally different focus area than Unity and as mentioned in the video many times - there are still situations where Unity is a definitive winner ;)

Let me know what do you think about Defold and Unity in the comments!
Should I tell something more about some ideas, should I explain or correct antyhing - also let me know! :)

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Best Regards,
Pawel

[maeligmoreau]

As a solo dev starting to get professional I can confirm that the Defold community is extremely welcoming and that forum admins are here for you no matter how clueless your question is. It also has one of the best workflow in my opinion.

[chris_gamedev]

I have never used Defold, i mainly use Godot. And in my opinion, every engine that is free and accessible for everyone is a win for all developers, a good competition between engines is always healthy <3

[MadrasB]

Thank you for posting videos about Defold, these help out a lot. Also, I feel like your video editing skills are getting better every time :)) hugely appreciated!

[SergeyLergDev]

Thanks for featuring my game! Great video

[prototype-mk]

thanks for making these videos bro there a great help :)

[sidremus]

I learned Lua the last year (along with the Love2D game engine) and was coming from C# (and Unity). From my experience I would strongly discourage anyone to use the book Programming in Lua.
Lua is a small language (few keywords), but due to the way it is set up, some very common concepts take quite a while to wrap your head around. The worst offender here is definitely object orientation / classes. Lua does not support them out of the box and while there are very good (and much better documented) class libraries out there, the way both the book and docs go about implementing them is really backwards. It's supremely frustrating, especially when your making games, as object orientation is a must there.
Roberto Ierusalimschy, author of both the book and docs, and designer of Lua may be very talented in making and maintaining this very popular programming language. However, his writing feels a lot like your looking into some academic's lecture which has haphazardly been reworked into a book.

[DavidSerranoIO]

Hey nice video. I've been playing with Defold recently, partly starting with your ship tutorial. In general I like how light and simple the engine is, although there are some things that I find a little weird (such as relying on string literals in code to reference identifiers).

In any case, I think that for 2D web and mobile games, it's probably the best engine.

In my case, another engine that I quite like is Godot, although its support for Android and iOS plugins is almost non-existent, which for me is ruled out for this type of use case.

[Henry_GamesX]

WOW, defold sounds like an excellent engine to use. And I didn't know that it had 3D support. I'm glad that I found this video that explains defold.

[Jdgo]

Hi Defold team, nice video, in the minute 2:55 shows a PBR example, where I can find that example, or how can start a project with pbr lights. I find your engine very interesting and I hope to start my 3d project soon.

[martingoodson]

Excellent informative video. Thanks for posting it.

[Manas-cowl]

I've use Unity but I was thinking of migrating due to its lack of support for 2D, its logo, as well as its somewhat questionable reputation over the years for a variety of reasons. I'm currently trying out Defold and while I didn't tinker around too much, it seems okay and does its job.

[Peliculasinventadas-gplk]

Apoando a el mejor motor de juegos EVER

[angelmesa]

Waoooo 💕💕 The comparative was very informative!

[superbitable]

I’m kind of tempted to try this mainly because of the Nintendo Switch support. Godot’s getting a Switch port in the future from W4 Games but that’s gonna have an annual cost so yeah. Maybe I’ll have to give Defold a try?

[ADITYAGAME]

How good is chatgpt3 for clearing doubts in defold game engine? Maybe do a video on this.

[blasterxt]

If you use lua then you can use them in defold, cry engine, O3de engine.

[ismothe]

so wait what's the official programming paradigm you use for Defold? Unity has OOP, which is a little easier for me to wrap my head around, I understand Lua has it's own way of doing that, but C doesn't even have objects and people used that to make SNES games back then. Programming in Lua is a great book, but the layers of abstraction are pretty difficult to peel compared to something like C#, like I could read that book in its entirety and still not know what to do with any of that. Is defold programming supposed to be of a functional paradigm?

[llawliet]

your interest map is outdated, how come you put UAE, Dubai, yellow color and it has almost the fastest interest in the world?

[Greninja]

W4 games is saying that Godot is going to support consoles port Officialy

[koganboss]

If you want to get serious about creating games, start with Unity right away, otherwise it'll be very hard for you later on. If it's just a hobby for yourself and you don't have any plans to devote all your time to it in the future, use anything you like, including this Defold. P.S. I'm working on games development since 2009, so I advise to listen.