Defold Game Engine

Defold is a free, lightweight, and high-performance game engine for building 2D and 3D games that deploy to all major platforms including PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5, Poki, and Facebook. Maintained by the Defold Foundation based in Sweden, the engine uses Lua as its scripting language and provides a complete integrated development environment with a visual scene editor, code editor, particle effects editor, tile map editor, and GUI editor. The engine requires no registration or upfront costs, allowing developers to download and start building immediately, with full source code available on GitHub and monthly releases. Games built with Defold include commercially successful titles such as Family Island by MoonActive with millions of daily active players, Hill Climb Racing Lite by Fingersoft, Monkey Mart by TinyDobbins, and Mad Skills Motocross 2 by Refold Games. The engine supports spine animations, skeletal animation, physics through Box2D and Bullet, live update for pushing content updates without app store releases, and native extensions for platform-specific functionality. Corporate partners include Rive for runtime animation, Heroic Labs for Nakama backend integration, and Poki for web game distribution. The Lua-based scripting system provides a lightweight and fast development experience, while the editor handles asset management, build configuration, and one-click deployment to all supported platforms. The engine also includes built-in support for in-app purchases, ads mediation, analytics, and crash reporting across mobile and desktop platforms.