We sat down with Ragnar Svensson, the lead engine developer of Defold at King, to talk about their very own games engine that they recently released for gamers to be able to create their own video games using the same engine as Blossom Blast Saga.
So with further delay, here is our interview.
Why did you choose to release the game engine?
Casual games get played by millions and millions of people around the world every day. Here at King, we have a technology that helps developers to build better games and games that will perform well on both low-end devices and in the browsers. We took this unique opportunity to share Defold – the internal technology we use in some of our own games, to serve the immediate industry needs.
Do you ask for any royalties like other game engines which are “free”?
No, we don’t. We make games that people love and we’ve built a successful business around our games, which remains our key focus. The Defold engine and editor with full functionality are completely free of charge. No hidden costs, fees or royalties. Just free.
We think that Defold is so good for making games that we want to give something back to the games development community. Having more users contributing with add-ons, extensions, documentation and more can be used by – and benefit everyone, inside and outside of King.
Blossom Blast Saga was created using Defold, do you plan to use it for your next games?
Blossom Blast Saga was built for mobiles and Facebook using a single codebase in Defold. We also several teams across our offices that are using Defold for production or pre-production on other games. Since we went public in March, the community has shipped more than 20 games and there are more in production. Empowering the developer community worldwide is our big focus right now.
Are you able to use it for your previous games such as importing Candy Crush Saga into it?
From a technical point of view, it certainly would be possible. However, it wouldn’t make much sense from a business point of view, as Candy Crush Saga is a game that performs really well just the way it is.
You choose Lua as the scripting language. Can you tell me more about why you chose that language to use?
Every programmer will probably have a very strong opinion on what language is good and what is bad. We think Lua is simple enough to empower designers yet flexible enough to get complex work done. Lua is a lightweight dynamic language that is very powerful. With this in mind Defold as it is today, allows you to modify the rendering loop using Open GL, write your own vertex and fragment shaders using GLSL, and in the near future we’ll be adding C++ as an option.
What do you hope you achieve by releasing Defold to the community?
We want people to build better games because this is something everybody can benefit from. Defold helps teams work together with less configuration and get to the finished product faster thanks to, among other things, easier testing and better workflow for designers.
We also hope that Defold will help us find new talent as new hires who have worked with the engine will also be familiar with some our tools and this should shorten the on boarding time drastically.
Do you plan to continue to maintain it as a learning platform?
Definitely and some schools have already picked up Defold to help them teach game development. We’re also working on a curriculum to empower game designers, we’re making a set of asset packs and example projects for people to boot up with Defold fast and more. The intention is to speed up Defold adoption internally at King and throughout the industry.
How will you interact with the community?
We have a forum on our website that King teams and the community can visit to ask questions specific technology questions and share their knowledge. Defold developers spend lots of time there with the community and we also have a Slack chat which is a place where people can get in touch with fellow Defold developers, artists and creators. We’re super active at game jams and hackatons – we have sponsored a few of these types of initiatives in the past and encourage our developers to visit them, share experiences and make a fun game with Defold.
We’d like to thank Ragnar, for taking the time to answer our questions and if you want to learn more about Defold and how you can use it to create your very own games, then head over to the Defold website.