Defold: 2D Game Engine by King.com | Hacker News Reader

Defold: 2D Game Engine by King.com

defold.com

135 pointswinterismute87 comments

Unfortunately it bakes in analytics that feed data back to King, not even you. Basically they're getting you to do the dirty work of getting them more entries in their customer tracking databases without them having to even make another Whale Acquisition Saga.

Also you're not in control of your own source code. It's stored on King's servers. I'm not trusting them with my shit.

"Not even you"

Is contradicted by the marketing copy: "Analytics built in with zero setup help you keep track of your game."

I'm all for exposing the true motivations at play here, but please keep things factual.

Sorry, I was going based off of what I remember from last year when I swore it off. Hopefully they'll allow you to disable it completely, but there was no way when I checked (again, last year).

The fact that it's even there rubs me the wrong way.

It is an analytics service that you can choose to use or not to use - it's totally up to you. If you don't use it no data is gathered from your users. (Currently it's off by default and you have to explicitly turn it on.)

Check out out FAQ and EULA at http://www.defold.com

(I work for Defold)

>Currently it's off by default and you have to explicitly turn it on.

As others have said, the fact that it is included is worrying and a reason I would not even test drive, however promising it looks, sorry.

Also, opting in for analytics means implicitly opting in for marketing and promotions per the linked site:

"marketing and promotion of our Services or related products, for example sending communications (including by email) for these purposes on our, or a third party's behalf. If you do not want us to use your data in this way please let us know by contacting us at: info@defold.com; "

shady

I don't know about Defold, but I'm getting lots of emails lately that goes like, hi customers, we changed our privacy policies and toc, make sure you read the hundred pages the following link and notice the subtle changes in wording without us providing a diff or breakdown. It is this easy to change default behaviour.

I can understand coming from that perspective, that including analytics could be interpreted as unnecessary for people not actually needing it. One of the reason it was added is since a lot of game devs want to actually see how their game is doing when released. But this is something they don't want to spend precious development time on. That money/time is better spent on doing cool games instead. :)

There is no hidden agenda here, we really just want to enable people to track installs/DAU etc across platforms without writing a row of boring platform specific analytics code.

That passage relates to us reaching out to you as a developer. (Your players and their data is covered in the separate player privacy policy.) If you don't want mails about updates etc just tell us and we'll stop sending them.

You are right, I did not read it carefully. Looking through the player privacy policy is still concerning though. The weasel word reasonably comes up 4 times, including:

3rd party sharing:

"We will only share your data with third parties:

with your consent (including as set out in this Player Privacy Policy);

as reasonably necessary in order to provide the Services to you;"

"as we reasonably believe is permitted by law or regulation; "

Information retaining: "We may retain information about you after you have deleted a Game or after we have ceased providing services if retention of your information is reasonably necessary to comply with our legal obligations, meet regulatory requirements, resolve disputes between members, prevent fraud, cheating or abuse, or enforce this Player Privacy Policy or any other agreement we may have with a user. "

Point 5. looks especially bad to me: "5. Other Information .. We may combine information that we collect from you with information about you that we obtain from such third parties and information derived from any other subscription, product, or service we provide. "

I understand it is not very different from currently accepted practices in privacy policies, and one could say it is unfair to point out just in this case, but it does not make it any better.

Disclaimer: I don't think Defold is a bad actor, just my 2 cents when somebody wants to do the right thing

Thanks for your comments. We're trying to gather concerns about our terms so we can discuss them internally.

We host git servers for you but of course it's your code. Editor 2 will make this service optional. Meanwhile there is a work around (albeit a bit clumsy). One of our core devs have written a tutorial here: https://forum.defold.com/t/howto-alternative-project-hosting...

(I work for Defold)

That is incorrect. There is an opt-in analytics solution though, and you can in fact store your code on any git server you like. :)

(This is how you change git server: https://forum.defold.com/t/howto-alternative-project-hosting...)

Disclaimer: I'm a developer at King. I work with "Fiction Factory" other of King's internal engines.

We had some weeks ago an internal presentation by the CTO and the Defold team. They explained their goals for doing it. The goals, as I remember them, to give Defold for free are:

* To improve Defold. The bigger the user base the more stable, relevant and useful it will be the product.

* To show people that King is a technology company. We do cool stuff.

* To be able to hire developers that already know our tech stack.

The first point is the most important one. What have helped to grow other engines has been a community of users that have helped to improve them in features and stability. Some times users help open source engines like Ogre3D, others they help paid engines like Unity3D. We think that King can offer a win-win situation with a free (like in free beer) engine with exciting features in exchange of a community that uses it and makes it relevant.

This ideas are in the box titled "Why are you releasing Defold free?" at the bottom of the site. If you want to read them from an official source.

Aren't king the copy cats doing candy crush, ripping off a lone dev? "We do cool stuff", yeah, no.

You can do cool tech stuff while ripping off other products.

I don't think that 'lone dev' invented 'get things i a line then they explode' game

That still doesn't justify suing him out of app stores.

No it doesn't justify suing.

Just because you make a shitty phone and puts an apple on it doesn't mean people will be buying your shit hands over fists.

Quality speaks for itself.

I think companies should be less territorial about names. Unless it is a direct copy, I'm sure the average people will be able to figure out that "candy smash" is a ripoff. After all only it won't have 20billion downloads.

No, but that lone dev 'invented' a game branded around the word 'candy' with very similar gameplay elements, graphics, and wording. Candy crush saga is a ripoff, and 99% of objective observers will confirm that. In king's defence, that's perfectly legal; whether it's moral or not depends on the compass of the beholder. CCS also appeals strongly to children and makes heavy use of IAP; again, you can draw your own moral conclusions from that (and King are obviously not the only company behaving that way).

> "CCS also appeals strongly to children"

This is nonsense. Nor King, nor other "big" companies do that. Look at the numbers "https://www.enolalabs.com/blog/archives/grossing-and-gaming-....

Companies also need to do games for kids like Nintendo, that does it in the most awesome possible way. But King does not do that.

If any marketing person is reading this. Please, take a look at King advertising, take a look at our branding and our merchandise products. King doesn't market casual games to children nor you should you do it.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2014/02/17/saga-candy-crush-...

Is this accurate?

How does your statement correlate with the subject actually?

For others who are curious about this: according to Wikipedia, the game in question is http://www.candyswipe.com. While it has the same theme, the core mechanic of the game is very different (swipe a path through candies of the same color vs swap candies to form lines of three). Candy Crush isn't a rip off of this game.

Finally, perhaps it's to collect analytics data from games using your engine? I see Defold comes with "analytics out of the box". That data has to go somewhere, and I bet it's King's servers.

No data is collected unless you actually opt-in for the analytics.

I'm one of the engine devs. :)

What is the browser support like for the html5 output? Performance?

I don't have any numbers for you, but I would assume it's on par with other engines compiled with emscripten. We do however focus a lot on performance overall in the engine, and keeping the binary size low, so I would believe we st least are in the front comparatively. :)

There is currently a push for HTML5 related tasks in the planning, so it will only get better.

I've spent some time prototyping with Defold and found it a joy to work with. The write once run anywhere is great but the real power comes from live changes. You can edit code while the game is running and see live changes. Iterations taking a few seconds (even on target platform) is a huge win for game devs.

I'd recommend checking it out as an alternative to Unity if you are making a 2D game.

This is an ambitious statement =] But yes, the engine at the current state may be decent for certain use cases. We're working to make it better, obviously. Give it a try at a game jam neat you. Or at the upcoming Ludum Dare.

I found the previous discussion interesting because it shows how far this project has come over the last few years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791284

Feels like King come up against a significant wall of resentment when they do anything, perhaps some of it justified some of it not so much.

Defold seems like a nice idea. As with any games engine it's never about the quality of the engine but the asset pipeline you put in front of it (see Unreal engine for a grade A example of this). I didn't see much talk about the asset pipeline, I see people from King are around, anyone care to comment?

Yes. So King uses the engine internally, right? The tech is driven by the Blossom Blast Saga team and by another 5 internal teams using the engine. In fact, the engine team and the games team reside in a same room, and are isolated to a separate building from the other teams. A close collaboration in a very productive environment. From where I am ;-)

Oh.. so the art/assets pipeline is pretty much dictated by the internal teams. But feel free to use the engine and explain on Defold forums of the good and the bad. We'll be happy to listen.

Ooops, missed this question, sorry for the late reply. :)

The asset pipeline is not as customizable as one could wish for in it's current form, but something that will change with the upcoming new editor. In honesty, we haven't had a lot of requests in this regard in-house yet, but if this is something that is highly requested by indie users we will surely look into this.

(Hold tight, going into a bit of a tangent below.)

We put a lot of effort into performance, keeping the binaries small and having fast development iteration.

One very nifty thing is that the build/pipeline can be run as command line command, without even opening the editor, which enables you to setup your own build command in Sublime Text or on a build bot for example... (I have something like this at home where I can code in Sublime, hit Ctrl+B and it will build with the same code as the editor and automatically launch the game, all from inside my favorite code editor. Just imagine how sweet this will be when the pipeline/engine is a bit more extendable. :))

Yet another cool thing of course is being able to hot reloading resources while the game is running, also tying into the fast development iterations.

Hope this at least answers some of your questions. :)

Yes, thank you for taking the time to reply.

Where's the redirect to some app store bullshit after 5 seconds?

Never buying or using anything from those sleazeballs, and you should follow suit.

What's with the animosity? There seems to have been a lot of effort put into Defold, the least you could do is appreciate the fact it's been made available free of charge and royalties.

The Why are you releasing Defold free? section basically says because "You guys can work making our software better for us for free"

Also you need a Google account to use it.

I don't really wanna defend King.com, but I think you're being a bit uncharitable. They talk about the community "creating tutorials, by finding bugs, improving the documentation". It's just tautological that you'll get more bug reports the more users you have, and creating tutorials/refining documentation are particularly suited to crowdsourcing (as the designers are often too close to the application to understand what a newbie needs to know).

"I don't really wanna defend King.com"

Sure. I cherry picked the negative because of this.

There are too many game engines that are made for special purpose studios (People who have experience with them)

I think there are a lot better GPL'd engines people should use so the community benefits; not Candy Trademark king King.com

Particularly Libgdx; Blender3d ; Godot

Now that I think about it game engines are a bit like Linux Distros in that all the options possibly dilutes the greater purpose.

And how is that a bad thing? You're missing the fact that people "testing" it are consumers, meaning any improvements will benefit them as well. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Sure, I don't disagree.

I just argue it's more like

[Consumer] diluted Win-Win [King]

I posted another response with more details of better (Subjective) GPL'd community friendly engines.

It's not free. The currency is your users' data.

Currently, your projects can only be stored on King's servers, not even github. When you finally publish your game, it will automatically include analytics that phone home to King, not you.

Interesting, can you provide a link to the source code that supports your claim?

Closest I could find to boondaburrah's claim was: http://www.defold.com/about-privacy/

"We provide data collection and statistics of your players, if you want it – In order to provide Player Analytics, we need to collect data on your Players such as how they play Games and what device they used. If you choose not to use Player Analytics, we won’t collect any data relating to Players (except for errors directly related to the Defold Engine). Please see our Privacy Policy for Players http://www.defold.com/about-player-privacy/ for more information about what Player data we collect and what we do with it."

Interesting. There wasn't any way to turn it off when I last checked, but that was last year (during beta). Hopefully they'll allow you to get rid of it completely, but it still feels too much like my game would be tied up with King in some way, and I'd never want that.

Currently you have to explicitly turn analytics on, so it it opt-in.

(I work for Defold)

Doesn't mean it doesn't collect data server-side, now does it? And even if, there's still a blatant amount of scheming involved.

No, we collect no data about your users unless you use our analytics service. If you need analytics and does not want to use ours you can roll your own.

What kind of scheming do you believe we are up to? I'm asking because we really want to do the right thing and be open about Defold. Maybe you have questions we have failed to answer properly?

Both of those allegations are false.

Nothing is sent to any King servers, unless you actually want to use our analytics tools, which is an opt-in solution anyway. :)

The only reason why projects are hosted on our servers is due to the legacy of the engine, originally planned as a subscription service, long before being acquired by King. This is something that really wasn't a problem up until now, which is why it simply has stayed that way.

We want it to be easy for users to just create a project and start coding, not having to spend time on setting up development environment and code hosting. However, of course we see this is something people want to be able do as well. We will add the ability to more easily configure where projects are hosted (or even use local projects (already added to the new editor)).

But it's even possible right now to actually change your Git server to your own (or GitHub as you mentioned), I wrote a guide on it here: https://forum.defold.com/t/howto-alternative-project-hosting...

You need a Google account to use Defold?

Right off the bat things are heading in the wrong direction.

Considering these guys tried to trademark the word Candy, among other questionable actions, I don't think I'd use/trust anything they offer.

Why is that questionable? They made a very popular game and, as happens with profitable apps, a ton of developers fire up their clone factories and start creating Candy Crash, Candy Mush, Candy Squeeze, Candy Crush HD, and any other name they can think of in order to cause confusion in the market and cash in on their efforts. Isn't this kind of thing exactly what trademark law was designed to protect against? Keep in mind that to trademark something you need to narrowly define the scope in which the trademark applies. So places selling actual candy or those using the word candy not in a computer game would be completely unaffected.

Are you suggesting that no other games used the word 'candy' in their title prior to Candy Crush?

All those developers would suddenly be hit by this trademark, and would be forced to rename their pre-existing games, unless they can afford to lose money on some expensive lawyers.

Prior use is a defense against a trademark claim. Yes, it may involve lawyers to enforce that right, but the reality of the business world is that if you have a name you want protected, then you register for a trademark of that name (and if you don't get it, pick another name). Otherwise, be prepared to have to fight for it if someone registers the name you're using after you had the opportunity to do so but didn't.

Because King's Candy Crush is a ripoff/clone of Candy Swipe..

http://metro.co.uk/2014/02/13/candy-crush-saga-makers-to-sue...

The part of that article that really sucks is that King went out of their way to purchase the rights to a game that was made in 2004 and had a "Candy" trademark in order to prevent the 2010 registrant from contesting. That's playing dirty.

That aside, it certainly seems to be inspired by CandySwipe plus Bejeweled. Not as bad as FreeCiv, which is a blatant, unashamed clone of Civization (with only minor differences). But I guess nobody complains about that since it's free.

I got a couple questions for the devs behind it. We've also looked a bit to at it, we're a cocos2d studio, but thinking of moving to cocos2dx or unity for future projects, and ofcourse Defold is an interesting alternative as well.

My questions are

1. Can you extend the engine with any missing features. Two example cases: If we want to use some iOS specific feature that Defold my default doesn't support. Or if we'd wanted to implement Spriter support (instead of Spine).

2. Can you write your own shaders? Only thing I could find on it, is some tinting stuff, but that's not enough.

Thanks for releasing the engine for free and keeping it 2D focused!

1. If you can build it in Lua, yes. We are working on low level extensions but that will happen some time in the future.

2. Absolutely! We haven't got any good tutorial yet but you have full access to shaders.

Just wanted to say, don't forget to look at MOAI: http://getmoai.com/

Your questions reminded me of the prominent 'yes' in the case of the MOAI framework ..

Here's a demo written in Defold. Lots of shaders! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ij7louE670

A very cool talk on the Clojure tech behind the tooling of the engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajX09xQ_UEg

This is the new upcoming editor, but still very interesting!

Seems nice. Apparently the scripting is in Lua.

That's pretty standard in most game engines, Lua is a nice intersection of fast + memory efficient.

Also, trivially embedable into game engines and a modern(mostly well thought out) language make it an obvious choice.

Surprised by all the vitriol in this thread. Defold looks awesome. Maybe I just haven't tracked King closely enough in the past to have developed the community knee jerk reaction here, but this seems like a cool move.

Build once deploy anywhere to six different platforms sounds too good to be true. Code existing on King servers sounds super sketchy. I do like that you script in Lua, which is pretty standard in gaming. Still, I'm probably going to stay away from early adopting this.

Or give it a try (hey, a free software with decent tutorials that doesn't require install/deploy) and return with a facts-based feedback ;-)

I'm really interested if anyone has advice on the best cross platform 2d focused game engine?

I've liked Corona SDK, though multiple recent ownership changes does leave me uneasy. The creators of Crashlands swear by Game Maker, but I wouldn't go there if you have any kind of programming experience already as the UI will just be in your way all the time. While Unity is accepted as best for 3D, many devs love it for 2D with the right libraries.

Unity is the most popular engine at the moment. Saying that it is the best is going a bit far. I actually think that Unity is one of the best 2D engines available. For 3D the tools are really broken for production use, and Unity is quite unresponsive about fixing them. And the renderer quality is a bit of a far cry from CryEngine or Unreal Engine, but is getting there bit by bit. Except that those two are also progressing, mostly by doing actual new research in the field.

Still, new 2D engines are welcome as Unity still has the 3D package to work with in a 2D game.

Godot is great. Full editor, it has it's own 2D bone animation system(!), own scripting language (very easy to pick up - Python-esque with simple semantics - you can program in it without really knowing it because there's not much to know) and it deploys to pretty much every target you can think of (it's written in C++ with very few dependencies).

Thanks for the input peops

Unity.

My answer will of course be biased, since I work on Defold.

But if you are going for a 2D game, I think Defold is a really good choice. We support Android, iOS, desktop (Win, OSX and Linux) and HTML5. We try to solve all the icky platform specific stuff for you. And to start coding you only need to download the editor, there is no development environment to set up.

Are you doing fancy 3D stuff, then Unity will probably be better, currently. :)

The demo on the first tutorial page (http://dashboard.defold.com/projects/16850/tutorial/0) is majorly broken, including styles and with dozens of console errors. Interesting project to keep an eye on, not ready for the spotlight yet though.

I heard that there were problems with the tutorial on the dashboard, the one on the main site should work better;

http://www.defold.com/tutorials/getting-started/

Thanks. Check out that tutorial through the main page at http://www.defold.com/tutorials/getting-started/

Should work better.

How does this compare to cocos?

We've (we=some of the Defold core team) spent a good time with a bunch of Cocos2D core devs at GDC. Each tech has strong sides and features in development. Currently Defold is a young free tech mostly used at King. But this improves at a pace of a solid couple of hundreds per day.

It's marketed as "free". Is it like "free beer", or "free speech"?

Free beer. They even try a switch-a-roo by putting a super positive spin on "free" and then doing a "(as in free beer!)".

@SvenAndersson Are there any plans to make the GUI feel and look more native on OS X?

We are working on a new editor, a total rebuild (dropping Eclipse), which will also have a much better GUI/look. It will also enable extendability of the editor and pipeline.

It will have a unified look across all platforms though, but I would believe it's a bit more "OS X like" compared to the old Eclipse stuff.

In short, it will look a bit more modern than the current one. :)

Awesome, looking forward to it!

Does this mean you'll be using QT for your cross-platform GUI?

For the new editor we are using JavaFX i believe.

wtf is with the huge terms and conditions?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com