Defold
More info
- Creator
- Ragnar Svensson, Christian Murray
- Released
- Owner
- Defold Foundation
- Type
- Game engine
A Swedish, 2D-first engine that King bought, used in-house and then gave away.
Defold started in Stockholm in 2009 with Ragnar Svensson and Christian Murray. King acquired it in 2014, made it free to use in 2016 and in 2020 handed it to the independent Defold Foundation, source code on GitHub.
The engine is C++ underneath, game logic is Lua, and worlds are assembled from game objects with components, grouped into what Defold calls collections. It is obsessed with small binaries and fast startup, which makes it a favourite for mobile and web games — HTML5 export goes through WebAssembly. The editor, somewhat unexpectedly, is written in Clojure.