Defold Product Overview

Defold is a turn-key solution, providing everything you need to build a game. Learn about the major features of the engine on this product page. Make sure to also check the Learn pages for additional and more detailed information.

2D focused, 3D capable

Defold is built from the ground up as a 3D engine with special focus on top-notch tools for 2D game creation. Build your games using a component based system for maximum performance and modularity.

2D components

2D sprites
Spine models
Tile map editor for 2D levels

3D components

3D models - load models and animations
3D mesh - create and modify 3D geometry at runtime
Custom materials and shaders - Shaders written in GLSL

Particle effects

Particle effects editor with live preview of emitter and modifier behavior
Curve editor for controlling particle parameter changes over particle lifespan
2D and 3D particle emitters

Animation

Defold has a powerful animation system for visual components and scripts. Use flipbook animations for sprites and other 2D components, bone animations for models and property animations for movement, rotation, tweens and other values.

Flipbook animations

Flipbook animations for sprites
Flipbook animations for GUI nodes
Flipbook animations for particles

Spine and model animations

Spine bone and model animations with full support for blending
Keyframe events
Inverse kinematics in keyframes and dynamically scriptable

Property animations

All sprite and GUI properties can be animated
Custom script property animations
Predefined or custom easing functions for all property animations

Artist friendly

Assemble and layout your game in the artist friendly scene editor. Build levels, player characters, bosses, screens and user interface components all from within the editor.

GUI editor

Layered GUI with text, images and pie nodes
GUI clipping/stencil masks
GUI image nodes support 9-slice texturing
Automatic GUI layout with support for orientation changes
Bitmap and distance field fonts
Use GUI templates to reuse UI elements and quickly build complex views

Scene editor

Scene editor for assembling and laying out assets
Prefab construction of game objects
Create hierarchies to organise and group objects

Advanced physics simulations

Attach collision shapes and physics properties to your objects and have them interact in real time. React to collisions using code to create complex interactions.

2D and 3D physics (Box 2D and Bullet) fully integrated
Static, dynamic and kinematic (scriptable) physics objects

Shape based and ray-cast collision detection
Precise collision detection for tilemaps

Robust triggers
Joint and motor support

Fully scriptable

Write all of your game logic using the Lua scripting language. Lua is a commonly used scripting language for games with an easy to learn syntax and great performance.

Lua

Integrated code editor with syntax highlighting and code completion
Integrated debugger - step through code and inspect variable
Fully scriptable rendering pipeline with low level access

Reactive code style

Engine supports reactive-style Lua scripting for low overhead and great performance
Asynchronous communication between game objects

Cross-platform

With Defold you create your game once and export to all supported platforms without making any changes. The Defold APIs work across all platforms and you do not have to worry about typical platform specific things such as file paths, texture formats, input methods, render pipelines, networking protocols or in-app purchasing systems. We got you covered!

Truly cross-platform

One-click deployment to all target platforms from the same code and content
Additional platforms such as Steam and Facebook Instant Games supported via extensions
Editor and tools running on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
Turn-key software with no dependencies on other programs - No need for Xcode or Android Studio for mobile deployment!
WebGL, OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal

Surprisingly lightweight

Static content dependencies and automatic resource management. Only used assets are included in game builds
Sprite packing to atlases
Texture compression configurable per platform
Dynamic batching in the render pipeline

Performance and stability

Defold has a very small engine runtime and it performs really well even on old hardware. We spend a significant amount of effort to make sure it stays that way. The engine is designed from the ground up to conserve memory, take up little disk space and not waste CPU cycles. Keeping the engine small allows you to release games on platforms which many other engines are unable to support.

Small engine

PLATFORM	DEFOLD 1.4.7	UNITY 2022.3.3f1	GODOT 4.0.3
Android (32+64 bit)	3.4MB	18.9MB	39.6MB
iOS (64 bit)	1.3MB	7.3MB	?
HTML5 (wasm, gzip)	956KB	2.7MB	9.8MB

Test made using an empty project. Exported to target platform using default settings. Release builds.

Performant

Renders tens of thousands of game objects without flinching (see this example)
Runs well on old hardware and in mobile phone browsers

Stable

Four week release cycle with two week beta period
Breaking changes are extremely rare
Engine crashes are few and far between

Rapid workflow

Long turnaround time kills productivity and hampers creativity. Developers should be able to rapidly test new ideas, iterate on game mechanics or tweak levels. That is why a Defold build usually takes only a couple of seconds. You're even able to push new or updated content and game logic to an already running game on your desktop, phone or console.

Hot reload

Hot reloading of updated assets and logic - change anything and instantly see the change in your game

Wireless hot reloading, debugging and visual profiling on device
Hot reload with custom Lua hooks for setup and inspection

Custom workflows

Stand alone build pipeline for custom workflows - integrate with your own scripts or CI framework
Headless builds for automated testing
Library sharing between projects - reuse code and assets
Asset Portal with reusable components - official and community developed
All data in easily merged text files

Build and refactor

Fast build times. All build targets, even HTML5, are completed in seconds
Asynchronous (or synchronous) loading of asset data
Automatic refactoring of assets

Optimize and debug

Live on-screen visual profiler
Remote web-based profiler with visual frame sampling
Built-in video capture of game footage
Native crash log APIs

Add Engine Features with Native Extensions

The Defold SDK allows you to write extensions to the engine in C, C++, ObjectiveC, Java and JavaScript.

Develop extensions directly in Defold without the need for setup or extra compilers. We build a custom engine for you in the cloud.

Typical use cases are:

High performance calculations and data processing.
Access to specific hardware, for instance the camera on mobile phones.
Interact with external SDKs, for instance advertising or analytics.

Learn more about Native Extensions

Production ready

Defold is a battle tested and production ready game engine. Integrations with popular third party analytics, app economy and game services are officially supported and maintained by the Defold Foundation.

Google and Apple push notification APIs
Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook in-app purchases APIs
Facebook SDK APIs

Google Play Game Services
Firebase Analytics
AdMob, IronSource and other ad integrations and mediation services

Web Sockets
Nakama, PlayFab, Colyseus and other game backends
More extensions in the Asset Portal

Why use Defold and not some other engine?

We get this question from time to time, but it is not really a question that can be answered without elaborating a bit on the design philosophy of Defold. We make no claim that Defold is the best game engine out there for any game, but we dare to say that Defold is the best game engine for some games. We have spent a lot of time and effort making sure that certain key elements of the game development process are as smooth and effortless as possible and we believe it makes Defold stand out from the crowd. Read on to learn more.

Why Defold?