It’s time to announce what the april-game will look like! This month I will take a look at the Defold engine and make a very simple casual mobile game.

The Defold Engine

Defold belongs to King, THE mobile game developer, which is known for the Candy Crush game series. It provides an simple editor with basic components you need for making a game, like a GUI for placing sprites and other components, a debugger, a console and the possibility to deploy the game by nearly one click for every platform. It has both 3D and 2D capabilities and makes deploying games for mobile platforms very very easy. The coding language is Lua. The engine is available for free since 2016.

The Game

The idea is to learn the basic components of Defold by making a very simple casual game for mobile devices. The main components will be Smileys! They will spawn and move across the screen, and the player has to tap on some of them in a certain order as fast as possible. This will also unlock new types of smileys. A GUI will show the current score, the time passed, and the smileys that have to be catched.

I already worked on that game for about a week now and this is how the current state looks like:

Little time (again!)

And again, this month I don’t have much time to make a great game… Therefore I will make it as simple as possible. So for example I wont do all graphics on my own. I will use smileys that are available for free. Also the gameplay will be really simple but hopefully addictive enough.

Also I have to learn Lua first! It’s a scripting language I never touched before. Googling led me to this video: Learn Lua in one Video. I think it’s a good starting point.

The plan is to deploy the game for Html5 and Android. I never published a game on Android before so maybe it will be released a bit later as I have to get to know the process of publishing a game on Google Play first.

In summary, there are many new things to learn this time! Let’s see how far I’ll get.

And I’m really excited to get to know Defold! Wish me luck!

Source code

Of course this project will be open source, too! Download the the current state from GitHub or right here: