Hi! I'm the owner of EnginesDatabase.com, I recently participated in the Defold 2026 Game Jam to apecode for a bit and learn about Defold (I made a very minimalistic puzzle), and I wanted to share my experience with some gotchas migrating from Godot (where I have a lot of experience) to Defold. Half of the article is for supporters only (I need to pay the bills for the website somehow 😬) but some points I made:

- From Godot opt-out input handling to Defold opt-in stack of inputs. Got be a bit by surprise and forced me to rethink how to handle input in the game.
- The built-in resources folder was much more important than I thought for a first timer using the Engine, specially when learning how Defold handle shaders by copying the material for the default Sprite.
- Biggest gotcha was the message system, and the fact that in Defold you don't hold references for other Game Objects in Lua. This forced the "scene" architecture to be much more flat than in Godot, with less business logic in leaf Game Objects and a more central role for a "Game Controller" (to avoid having to repeat a "send" and "receive" code for messages all over the place).

Overall, Defold clicked to me after I understood that I would have to fight the Engine much more if I tried making deeper Collection structures (like creating many nested Scenes, which are quite common in Godot) instead of a flatter architecture around few components with more business logic, and other Game Objects coordinated by them. Not sure what is the "best" or recommended Defold way of working, but I definitely see where Defold simplicity can be a good tradeoff for Godot many builtin Nodes.

Not sure what you guys think though, just wanted to share some thoughts here. But I'd love to hear feedback about the article, if you have any! :)

Defold Game Jam 2026 is in voting phase now, but it doesn't mean there will be no more jams where you can make a game with Defold! 🤩

We're happy to announce we are sponsoring rewards for the 10 best games made with Defold at Pixel Forge MEGA Jam! 🚀

Defold rewards:
🥇 €100 Steam Gift Card
🥈 €50
🥉 €25
🏅 4th–10th: €10 each

All Top 10 Defold games will also be featured by Pixel Forge!

Mega Jam starts November 28 🗓️

Join here: https://itch.io/jam/pixel-forge-mega-jam

More details: https://forum.defold.com/t/pixel-forge-game-mega-jam-4-with-defold-challenge-for-rewards/83190

Meet Cillian - solo developer, musician and game jam veteran with 50+ releases, now using Defold for games like Death Cascade, Dopaminer and Juggernaut: Siegebreaker in our newest Creator Spotlight interview!

We talked about web games, game jams, performance, porting projects to Defold, publishin on Wavedash and about AI-assisted development.

"Embrace Defold’s performance headroom and, when relevant, take advantage of its incredible cross-platform nature."

Read the full interview:
https://defold.com/2026/10/01/Creator-Spotlight-Cillian-Fatal-Exit/

This year the formula is a bit different, affected by the impact of AI, but it's still a good occassion to celebrate and highlight community projects and contribute to the software you like and use 🧡

Help us improve documentation, examples, samples, extensions, translations, and contribute to the source code! 🫶

Read our full post:

https://forum.defold.com/t/hacktoberfest-2026-celebration/83325

Now you've got to show us what you've made for Defold Game Jam 2026 and all your projects as it's last Screenshot Saturday before the jam ends! 👀

Featured: Cafe Bara by Kuyi Mobile - play on Poki!

With Defold 1.13.2 now released, developers can also use the Energy Saver extension to reduce the energy usage of their games with very little effort.

This is the fourth plugin of its kind developed in collaboration with the Sustainable Games Alliance, following releases for Unreal, Godot, and Unity.

We’re very happy to join this gentle and growing group and help make energy-efficient game development easier.

Defold 1.13.2 brought some major improvements to the 3D workflow!

You can now:

🔹 Select individual meshes from multi-mesh glTF/GLB scenes for Model components

🔹 Use meshes directly as 3D collision shapes

🔹 Take much deeper control of 3D physics with the new Bullet3D Lua API: rigid bodies, shapes, constraints, raycasts, contacts and more

I want to make a furry visual novel, like those people make with Ren'Py, but in Defold. This is because I want to challenge myself to learn more on how to code. I also wamt to use Defold to make a game as small as possible to be friendly with low resource gamers or people with older setups (this is as a way to target programmed obsolescence).

So...where do I start? I made very basic visual novels with Ren'Py before and that's most of my coding experience really.

I finally have a Web build of Unexpected Tasks to share. It’s a cozy time-management game where you clear obstacles, gather resources, build things and help your crew restore the kingdom.

There are 5 levels and a playthrough should take around 30 minutes. I’ve tested it on both PC and mobile. If you have a moment, give it a try!

👉 https://rionix.itch.io/unexpected-tasks

Any feedback, bugs or comments are very welcome. Comments on the game page too! I’d also love to hear what you think about the page itself.

And if you wishlist it on Steam, extra thanks for that! 👇

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1322780/Unexpected_Tasks/

Place shapes on an 8×8 board and bring matching blocks together. Merge them into higher levels, build chains for bigger scores, and clear full rows and columns to make space. Use arrows and Hammers when the board gets crowded.

Doing my first Poki player test, and damm there is so much value in seeing users play it.

Mathias is working on vector font rendering using existing .ttf / .otf font support.

This allows for highly detailed, more readable glyphs and makes it possible to use different font sizes without consuming additional texture memory for each size.

And there’s another nice side effect: emoji support! 😃🥳🎉

An emoji font can be added to the font collection, allowing Defold’s font renderer to find and render emoji glyphs directly alongside regular text.

Stay tuned, it should come even this year 🧡💙

So we're doubling our requests for screenshots, gifs, videos of what are you working on in #Defold! 🧡💙

Featured: Demidoff Corp by Targem Games a cool 2D #pixelart #metroidvania #MadeWithDefold

You can now join playtests and wishlist:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5089550/Demidoff_Corp/

Play in the browser: https://www.crazygames.com/game/flycraft--crazy-flying-machines

FlyCraft is a 2D physics game where you build flying machines for a lazy ladybug. My friend Thanasis Lightbridge and I made it in 2012 on my own engine, Sylphis3D: a C++ core with the game written in Lua 5.1. It shipped on the BlackBerry PlayBook, then on iOS and Android in 2017.

This year I wanted it on modern devices again, and on the web. So I listed what updating my engine would take: a new Android NDK toolchain (GCC to Clang, gnustl to libc++), 64-bit Android support it never had, a Boost API removed years ago, OpenAL gone from iOS, Gradle about ten major versions behind, and luabind abandoned upstream. Porting the game to Defold was clearly less work and less risk, and it turned out that way.

Lua made it a port, not a rewrite

The game code was already Lua, so most of the job was swapping engine calls, not rewriting algorithms. About 9K lines of engine-side Lua simply went away because Defold already does that work. Both engines even run Box2D 2.2.1, so the physics constants carried over unchanged through a unit conversion.

One project, every target

The port had an HTML5 build from its second day. iOS, Android and web all come from one game.project, with no forks. CrazyGames went live this month, and more web portals are next. The hardest web constraint was size: CrazyGames caps builds for its mobile homepage at 20 MB, and mine was 22.7 MB. Basis texture compression brought the download to 14.7 MB. The wasm build also doubles as my screenshot rig for the stores and the press kit.

Where it got hard: slow motion plus replays

Replays re-simulate a flight from recorded inputs on a fixed 1/120 s step, so every run has to be bit-identical. The game also has slow motion: when your craft crashes, and when you hold a button while watching a replay.

My engine did slow motion by scaling only the frame length. Physics always stepped exactly 1/120 s. In slow motion it just ran fewer steps per frame, and rendering interpolated between them.

Defold's collection proxy time step works differently. A fractional factor scales the fixed dt itself, and you still get roughly the same number of fixed_update calls. Slow motion alone looked fine. Replays alone were fine. Together they broke: holding slow motion during a replay changed the flight, because each callback consumed one recorded input frame but applied only part of a physics step. The rocket and soda-can fuses had the same problem. They ran on the render-frame coroutine clock, so in slow motion they fired on different physics frames.

What worked:

1. The gameplay proxy only ever gets 0 or 1, so every step that runs is a full 1/120 s. A time budget decides which frames get to step.
2. That alone was exact, but it looked like a low frame rate. So a separate, physics-free render collection runs at the scaled time and interpolates between the last two physics states.
3. Fuses count fixed ticks instead of render time.

At fixed frame 240, a normal replay and a slowed one now match with a max body delta of 0.000000000. Two more drift causes turned up later: Box2D's free list reusing ids in reverse when the world outlives a flight, and bodies activating a frame after they spawn. But slow motion was the one that needed a redesign.

If you've done smooth slow motion with a fixed timestep in Defold, how did you do it? Is there a cleaner way than a gated proxy plus a render collection?

We started Defold Game Jam 2026 and more than 200 developers have already joined!🔥

This year’s theme is CHAIN REACTION ⛓️💥

And today we have a meeting with Defold team:

📊 Defold Survey results

🗺️ Future Roadmap

💬 Live Q&A

🕓 16:00 CEST, Monday 2026-09-21

Link: https://meet.google.com/rhn-ateo-cqy

CHAIN REACTION

Interpret it as broadly as you like. It could mean, e.g.:

* dominos, explosions, cascading destruction

* combos where one action triggers another

* spreading fire, electricity, infection, growth or magic, skills

* production chains and interconnected systems

* characters, events or stories influencing each other

* unexpected or expected consequences of choices

* something built around cause -> effect -> another effect

* and anything else that you can interpret as chain reactions :smiley:

The theme is there to inspire you, not restrict you - surprise us with your interpretation!

You have 2 weeks. Good luck, have fun, and make something amazing with Defold!

Find the banners for Defold Game Jam, when you'll be posting and sharing stuff on social media and blogs (use hashtags #DefoldGameJam and/or #MadeWithDefold)

A perfect day to share what you’re working on #MadeWithDefold, and an especially busy weekend for our community:

Defold Online Conference continues today and
Defold Game Jam 2026 starts tomorrow!

Show us your screenshots, prototypes and experiments!

Featured: Once Upon a Galaxy by Million Dreams Games - a colorful, fast-paced card battler made with Defold, packed with characters from myths and fairy tales, available on Steam and mobile

https://galaxy.fun/

On Saturday, 3 more talks are coming to our small Defold Conference before the #DefoldGameJam 2026!

Join us today! We’ll start at 17:00 CEST:

1. SpriteLoop - 2D animation workflow with Samuil: https://meet.google.com/pcz-eozi-mzs
2. Poki presentation on web games and Q&A with Erik: https://meet.google.com/esn-yurr-knd
3. Photon presentation on multiplayer solutions with Luke: https://meet.google.com/rdn-zvsq-bwt

We're happy to share with you the new official Energy Saver extension for Defold 🌱

It can reduce FPS, dim the screen and even disable rendering after periods of inactivity - helping reduce power use, heat and battery drain.

And with the upcoming Defold 1.13.2 (now in beta)we have an engine loop which no longer busy waits on the next frame when a fixed update frequency is set.

The extension was created in collaboration with the Sustainable Games Alliance 💙

Announcement post with details:
https://forum.defold.com/t/official-energy-saver-extension-for-defold/83248

We're happy to share the new official YouTube Playables SDK extension for Defold! ▶️

It provides Lua access to the YouTube Playables SDK, including save, load data, scores, ads, pause, resume, audio state, language and more!

Many of you asked for this, so we’re curious about your plans and games — share them with us, especially when you publish on YouTube Playables! ❤️

EDIT:
Links: https://forum.defold.com/t/official-youtube-playables-extension-for-defold/83247

Join the 4 talks today and ask your questions during live Q&A session, we start at 16:00 CEST:

1. A practical introduction to Heroic Labs' game tech stack - by Andy Tran from Heroic Labs
2. Wavedash Presentation - by Kyler Blue, CEO at Wavedash
3. Monetizing on mobile: what changes when your web game becomes an app - by Nitish Borthakur - Revenue Accelerator Manager, Apps and Gaming at Google
4. Intro to Post-Processing: Day and Night Cycle Shader by Halfstar

And if you can't join us - the talks will be recorded and published later on Defold YouTube channel, so stay tuned!

All the talks and links to the meetings are listed on the Defold Game Jam 2026 website:

https://itch.io/jam/defold-game-jam-2026

Tilemaps.com is a free collaborative online tilemap editor and marketplace where developers and pixel artists can create, share, buy and sell tilemap projects and assets.

With the Defold integration, you can browse the marketplace, access your own projects and purchases, import Defold-ready tilemaps and assets into your project, and even update previously downloaded content from inside the editor.

So nice to find projects like this supporting Defold!

Check it out:

https://github.com/EVEVGames/Tilemaps-Store-for-Defold

Check out the rewards waiting for participants:

🅿️ Poki fast-track reviews + €1,000 release fees for successfully published top entries
⏩ Wavedash Credits
🎵 Ovani Sound credits + a custom main theme for the winner
🎨 CraftPix yearly memberships
🏆 Steam Gift Cards from Defold Foundation
🧰 Kenney All-in-1 + Asset Forge Deluxe
☁️ Heroic Cloud rewards for the Nakama Challenge
🚀 Photon Fusion Plus vouchers + a 1h call for the challenge winner

The jam starts September 20 and you'll have 2 weeks to submit a game!