Oleg Pridyuk about Defold: "This is the technology with which we make games ourselves"

At the end of March, King Studio introduced its own free Defold engine. At the same time, it became known that the company hired Oleg Pridyuk as an evangelist. We asked him to tell us more about Defold – about the pitfalls, the features of the technology, and, most importantly, about why King has its own engine at all.

The first question is the simplest: how much does it cost. It is clear that the engine is free, but probably there are any pitfalls, like a percentage of sales or something like that?

Both the Defold engine and the built-in editor with all the functionality are absolutely free. No hidden fees, commissions, royalties or pitfalls. Just free.

Oleg Pridyuk, Evangelist King

How does the company plan to make money on it in general?

We are not going to monetize the engine. We create games that users like and build successful businesses on these games. That’s what we’re focusing on. Defold in the public domain is our contribution to the ecosystem of the gaming industry. In addition, we believe that the larger the user base [of the engine], the better the quality of games in general will be, which will benefit everyone, both in King and beyond.

And another reason is that talented teams who study Defold well may become part of King in the future. It is very valuable when a new team immediately knows the internal technologies perfectly.

And why does King need an engine at all? The company is quite successful in making casual games, why also explore the area of creating engines?

Defold is a technology that we use to make games ourselves. Such, for example, as the beautiful Blossom Blast Saga and others that are just getting ready to launch. The technology initially turned out to be reliable and tailored to the user, so we decided to share it with other developers.

The engine market is hot right now. The mobile niche is occupied by Unity and Cocos. Unreal works closely with PC and console developers. Also, CryEngine is now free. Where is the place for Defold, which developers is it aimed at?

At GDC, Unity announced that it owns 30% of the 1,000 highest-grossing games. Cocos estimated its mobile market share at approximately 15%. A simple calculation demonstrates that there are many possibilities. Companies that are content with homemade engines today may find tomorrow that our fast, compact and field-tested engine suits them perfectly.

And the question after that: what can it offer that other engines don’t have?

We are a gaming company. We know how to develop and launch a top game. Defold was created in close cooperation and with the participation of our strongest gaming teams. He definitely has the features necessary to develop and launch a high-quality game on mobile platforms or on HTML5. And now this wonderful technology has become available to everyone for free.

Visual scripts are a popular topic in development today. The engines are trying to be clearer and easier to learn. At the same time, on the contrary, from the very beginning, Defold positions itself as a tool in which it will be necessary to write code. Why are you going against the trend?

Defold was created with the direct participation of our own game development team, which used the engine and eventually gave feedback, reported bugs and requested certain functionality for certain platforms. That is, the team that worked on the engine worked very closely with professionals in their field and changed the engine in accordance with their requirements.

But different people have different sets of skills and different training. Therefore, we really want to improve the functionality of the engine – in fact, this is one of the reasons why Defold is distributed for free. We invite everyone to try to work with it and tell us how to improve it.

It is also very important to remember that we are not a software company and we have no goal to drive Defold users into the framework of some closed ecosystem. Everything, in fact, is exactly the opposite: we are working on integrating third-party tools that Defold users like, such as Spine. We are open to suggestions in this area.

For me, when I downloaded and launched the engine, the first shock was the absence of the usual editor. Well, you know, a lot of windows with projections, menus, all that. This is unexpected. Will it continue like this, or will you change something?

We invite you and the readers of our forums to discuss what we need to improve in the engine. At the same time, we have clear tutorials and built-in assets that allow anyone to quickly assemble a simple arcade. And we are also working on new tutorials and embedded assets, we plan to add the ability to stream on Twitch and we are going to improve interactions with the developer community. So we invite everyone to speak out and share their experience with Defold.

Defold is officially suitable for both two-dimensional and three-dimensional games. But, considering that there are only two projects in showcase so far – and both are two-dimensional, there is a feeling that the engine is more about 2D after all. Is it so?

Yes, the engine is designed to work with 3D, but we use it to make 2D games. That is, the tools are optimized to work with 2D. It is still possible to import 3D meshes and use them in the game, but you will have to code for this. We plan to improve the tools for working with 3D in the future. In fact, we have already started working on it.

As you know, the smaller the distribution of the game, the more often the game is downloaded, all other things being equal. And for modern developers, using Unity and Unreal in this context is a painful conversation. And how much does Defold add to the size of the game itself?

Thank you for such a question. He makes us proud of the work we have done. The runtime of the engine weighs 1.6 MB, plus a virtual machine of about 60KB. “Small, light and fast cross-platform engine” is our motto.

The last question is: what to expect from the engine in the near future, and what initiatives to expect from you in connection with it?

The Defold game engine is a great tool for experienced teams. We already see a huge interest and positive reaction from the industry, and some of the most talented people in game development want to work with him or even join our team. So we can’t wait to find out what’s next. It will be fun!