Defold Engine

Defold 1.12.4 has been released! 🎉 We continue our focus on making the engine faster, smoother and more reliable and adding some nice features: 🎥 New free camera mode in the Scene View Navigate 3D scenes more naturally with right-mouse + WASD controls, improved orbit, smoother zooming and better camera handling 🧩 Built-in glTF validation Catch problematic 3D assets earlier in the pipeline and avoid confusing runtime issues 🔤 Faster text rendering Text layout is now cached and reused when possible, giving a significant performance boost 🎨 More room for advanced rendering Draw calls can now use up to 16 texture units, and we have new shader precision options, opening more possibilities for materials and effects 🌐 Leaner HTML5 builds Unused HTML5/WASM code has been removed, helping keep web builds smaller and faster to load 🛠️ More fixes and improvements This release also includes improved Scene View manipulator performance, optimized sprite/frustum culling, WebGPU fixes, audio stability improvements, Box2D trigger fixes, and many more! #Defold #gameengine #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Read it here: defold.com/2026/05/15/8Bi…

How does a small indie studio go from one release to building a sustainable rhythm around multiple commercial games? In our new interview on the Defold Blog, Alex from @8BitSkull talks about Skull Horde, Steam launches, scope, demos, localization, console plans, Fates of Ort, Void Scrappers, Bore Blasters, and the studio strategy behind their games. Well worth a read for anyone making games! #Defold #blog #gamedev #indiedev #indiegames #bulletheaven #pcgames

Find us in the MeetToMatch app or meet us at the venue!

In just a few days, the Defold team will be heading to Digital Dragons 2026 🐉 If you’re going too, come say hello! We’d love to meet you, chat about games, and talk with fellow game developers. See you in Kraków! #DigitalDragons #Defold #gameengine

You can run it right from the Editor or follow on its Github repository: defold.com/tutorials/astr…

New to Defold? Check out our refreshed top-down movement tutorial now with more screenshots, tasks and crisp #pixelart by Mattz and Cainos 🧡💙 #Defold #tutorial #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

[Open Source] I made a new simple Defold example github.com/JuLongZhiLu/de… #MadeWithDefold #opensource #gamedev

Shared the part 13 of the introductory Defold series. In this part, I implemented BG music system and SFX sounds for the game immersion & also implemented difficulty related settings. You can watch this part on: youtu.be/ofs4XnHaCyw #gamedev #indiegame #indiedev #tutorial

Yes, there are many examples of 2.5D, and it depends on the specific idea for 2.5D. Yes, you can pan and zoom only in Editor, so moving in "2D" while all your objects being flat or 3D. We support billboarding, so you can make "paper" like games, or you can make 3D characters and restrict their movement to 2D (platformers, fighting games, etc.) - mix 2D and 3D however you like!

@defold Is there built in 2.5D support. I mean some way in the IDE to support the views usual for 2.5D? (Not full camera freedom for example)

We're working on a few updates for the 3D third-person sample playground: 🎮 gamepad support 🕹️better controls 🎶sounds 📈and performance optimizations We’ve been delighted to see people using the sample to kick-start their own projects, and we plan to create more samples like this in the future - with an FPS sample coming next! #MadeWithDefold #gamedev #indiedev #tutorials #3D

@Sumi64Bit Will be there soon! 😊

@defold add a light component please😭

@etk_games File -> Hot Reload (Ctrl/Cmd + R)! defold.com/manuals/hot-re…

@defold How 🤨

Defold is very good at making the edit-test loop fast. Hot Reload works in your running game without rebuilding everything 🔥 You can change scripts, assets, GUI files, collections, materials, and many other project resources, then hot reload them quickly. Here, we’re testing different parameters for a cascaded shadow mapping implementation in the upcoming FPS template. It’s perfect for tweaking rendering settings, adjusting the level blockout, modifying enemy AI code, and testing the changes immediately. #MadeWithDefold #gamedev #indiedev #3D #gameengine #tutorial

@SoftEngineer This Defold demo is a bit simplified to highlight only one thing, but it runs pretty fast, even on mobile with WebGL: defold.com/examples/model…

@Asatte235 Thank you for making so many tutorials for Defold! This is much appreciated! 🧡💙

I shared my first Defold related video exactly one and a half years ago. Over this period, I shared over 50 tutorials on it ranging from 4 minute to 5+ hours long series. And today reached 1000 subscribers🎉 It's a slow but steady progress. Thank you everyone for the support :)

Congratulations to the winners of the challenges at @Gamedevjs Jam 2026! Congratulations to @benjames171 for winning the Open Source Challenge by @github with Parcel Master! 📦 Ben writes a code that does the job and is clean, and a lot of his games #MadeWithDefold are #opensource! #indiegame #indiedev #gamejam

@gamefromscratch We want to stay in the loop and align with the user's feedback all the time. But we'll do one additional summary of all 6 releases of the first half of the 2026 in July and next one, as always, as a retrospective of a year ;)

@defold You know if you did annual or bi-annual "roll up" releases, I'd be able to cover it more... A rapid dev cycle is awesome, but it does make covering Defold really difficult! ;)

The awesome, free, cross-platform Defold game engine has made a major transition... into full glorious 3D! gamefromscratch.com/defold-is-now-… #gamedev #indiedev

The upcoming camera preview in the Editor will let you see exactly what a selected camera sees! 🎥👀 #Defold #gameengine #gamedev #indiedev #3D