We have long been a fan of the Defold Game Engine (check out full tutorial series here). Defold is a cross platform (including consoles!) completely free source available 2D and 2.5D game engine. Like most modern 2D game engines, it’s actually fully 3D under the hood, just with tooling that focuses on 2D work. Just like the GDevelop game engine, the Defold game engine has recently been adding more and more 3D functionality.
In the most recent update the Defold game engine received one new feature required for 3D game development, a fully unlocked 3D camera. From the 1.12.4 release:
- NEW: (#6519) Shader precision options (by Jhonnyg)
- NEW: (#11750) Increase number of texture units per draw from 8 to 16 (by Jhonnyg)
- NEW: (#12032) Deprecate the legacy LiveUpdate APIs (by AGulev)
- NEW: (#10478) Add glTF validator (by Jhonnyg)
- NEW: (#11697) Fix build error source links for embedded resources (by AGulev)
- NEW: (#11828) Improved Scene View manipulator performance (by matgis)
- NEW: (#3893,#12171) Update editor JGit dependency to version 7.6.0 (by matgis)
- NEW: (#11185,#8840) Free camera mode in scene view + enhanced camera controls (by JosephFerano)
It is the final new feature that is key to moving Defold into full 3D functionality. Defold has long been focused on 2D and 2.5D development so you will still find several 3D focused features missing. It will be interesting to see how Defold evolves from this point.
Key Links
You can learn more about the Defold game engine and see the new 3D functionality in action in the video below.