I think the contalk about how Defold uses Clojure and an in-memory, transactional graph database to make the GUI highly customisable might be interesting to the HN crowd:
Just to be clear
1) all Clojure and other goodness have nothing to do with the game engine. It is editor only.
2) it's not even editor one can download - instead you'll get something based on Eeclipse, which has nothing to do with what is in video
3) Weirdly overcomplicated system around something others (like Corona) was doing for at least 3 years already
I really want to love Defold, but just think it too big a risk to build your business on a game engine that you can't fork and continue to support if Activision / Blizzard decide that is not making money for them anymore and drop it.
Looks interesting, but I'm not sure how much traction this will get outside of King.
Compared to the competition, such as Corona SDK, King will have to work real hard to build a community and ecosystem around Defold.
In 2016, having a great technology alone is not enough to get traction in game dev, all other parts of the ecosystem matter a lot: language, plugins (own and third party), art assets, tutorials (written and video), books, mind share retaining efforts (podcasts, events and etc).
Unity got this quite right, others are working hard to catch up (Unreal, Corona in 2D space).
Being open source is a huge boost as well, in terms of flexibility of development as well as peace of mind for the third party devs that the owner of the engine won't switch to the dark side with the next leadership change or simply let the technology get obsolete by not releasing new versions any more.
Still, I welcome this, Defold is a cool engine - hope that King open sources this eventually.
> GamesBeat: Is this going to be open source?
Hartwig: It’s not open source, but it’s free of charge. There are no royalties or team size limitations. You get all the features on all platforms. For us, the main driver—There are two reasons. One, we believe that opening the engine up to external developers will increase our product quality. That will benefit us internally when we develop our games. Two, we want to support the game industry. We think we can bring a lot of value to the whole industry by helping indie developers create awesome games.
This was very weird to read, especially with King's attempts to sue/patent troll dozens of indie studios which used anyt of the words "Candy" "Crash" or "Saga" in their game titles.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajX09xQ_UEg
Not sure if I agree with the "weirdly overcomplicated system" comment though, it looks like a fairly elegant system to me?
Compared to the competition, such as Corona SDK, King will have to work real hard to build a community and ecosystem around Defold.
In 2016, having a great technology alone is not enough to get traction in game dev, all other parts of the ecosystem matter a lot: language, plugins (own and third party), art assets, tutorials (written and video), books, mind share retaining efforts (podcasts, events and etc).
Unity got this quite right, others are working hard to catch up (Unreal, Corona in 2D space).
Being open source is a huge boost as well, in terms of flexibility of development as well as peace of mind for the third party devs that the owner of the engine won't switch to the dark side with the next leadership change or simply let the technology get obsolete by not releasing new versions any more.
Still, I welcome this, Defold is a cool engine - hope that King open sources this eventually.
> GamesBeat: Is this going to be open source? Hartwig: It’s not open source, but it’s free of charge. There are no royalties or team size limitations. You get all the features on all platforms. For us, the main driver—There are two reasons. One, we believe that opening the engine up to external developers will increase our product quality. That will benefit us internally when we develop our games. Two, we want to support the game industry. We think we can bring a lot of value to the whole industry by helping indie developers create awesome games.