Getting started with Defold

New to Defold? Switching from another engine? Want to build your first game? Learn something new, sharpen your skills, or just find an example?

This is the right place to start!

We’ve gathered manuals, step-by-step tutorials, videos, examples, courses, and more to help you get started and keep moving.

Firsts steps

If you’re new to Defold - whether you’re coming from another engine or starting from scratch - choose a curated track that matches your skill level.

Introduction

Welcome to the game development! Start here to learn the Defold basics - it is the best place for complete beginners or anyone who wants a guided first project.

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Defold for Unity users

A dedicated guide for users with prior Unity experience, who want to ramp up quickly without fighting the engine. It maps the most common concepts and tools between Defold and Unity.

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Defold for Flash users

A migration guide for users with previous experiences with Flash and ActionScript looking for a familiar path into the Defold game engine, that maps common concepts and tooling.

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Manuals

Learn from our extensive collection of manuals. The manuals cover everything from basic setup and core concepts to advanced topics such as shader programming.

Installing Defold

Installation of the Defold editor is quite straightforward. Download the version built for your operating system, extract it and copy the software to a suitable location.

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Creating a project

Learn how to create a new project starting from an empty project, templates, samples or tutorials, and how to open an existing project already located on your computer.

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Building Blocks

At the core of the Defold game engine's design are a few concepts that are very important to get a good grip on. This manual explains what the building blocks of Defold consist of.

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More manuals

Tutorials

Our tutorials section is the perfect place to start from if you are new to Defold game development.

Side scroller

Beginner

This tutorial is intended to give a taste of what making games in Defold is about. It goes through creating a new project, based on a simple side-scroller. You will then learn how to tweak the game to make it more fun. Finally you will add a new game object. The tutorial should only take about 10 minutes.

Snake

Beginner

If you are new to Defold, this tutorial will help you to get started in Defold. In this tutorial you'll make a snake clone using just a tilemap and a simple script.

Colorslide

Intermediate

In this medium difficulty tutorial you build an in-game GUI, a GUI screen for level selection and a start screen for a simple multi level mobile game.

Videos

The Defold video tutorials are a great starting point if you are a visual learner.

Platformer Defold Tutorial 1 - Sprites, Tilemaps, Basic Setup

Unfolding Gamedev

A beginner-friendly tutorial series on creating a 2D platformer game in the Defold game engine, aiming to help viewers gradually learn game development. Introduction to creating a platformer game in Defold, covering sprites, tilemaps, and basic setup.

Zelda Style Camera With Defold - Smooth Room Transition Camera

Asatte Games

Learn how to create a camera solution with smooth room transitions.

Complete Defold Course - Learn Beginner/Intermediate Level

Zenva

Master Defold - a free and powerful game engine for building 2D & 3D games!

Courses

Our courses section is the perfect place to start, if you are new to Defold game development and build something with a guided approach.

Defold 101 – Open-Source Game Development

In this course, you’ll dive into Defold, master how it works from scratch, and also explore essential fundamentals with the Lua scripting language. These skills will provide you the boost you need to start working with Defold in general and prepare you with the foundations for any sort of game you wish to build.

Deep Into the Space

Through this course, you will program a spaceship that moves through space. This will be a great opportunity to learn the basics of the Defold engine

Tilemap Farm Adventure

In this module, you’ll learn how to use Defold’s tilemap system to create a small environment, and you’ll be introduced to the concept of modules.

More courses

Examples, API reference and FAQ

Learn from code samples, our extensive collection of manuals or browse the API reference.

Examples

A selection of code samples and examples to learn from.

API Reference

Reference documentation to all Defold Lua and C++ extension APIs.

FAQ

The FAQ contains the answers and solutions to common questions and problems.

Examples by Britzl

A large selection of Defold examples and games.

Games by Ben James

More than 20 complete Defold games with source code.

Examples by Jcash

A couple of Defold example projects.

Examples by JhonnyG

Misc rendering related Defold example projects.

Community

Learn from others, share your own knowledge, showcase your games and interact with the development team.

Forum

Stuck? Talk to the Defold team and our great Defold developer community.

Discord

Want to chat with other Defold users? Join our Discord server to start chatting!.

Reddit

Share your creations, learn from others, and get help on Defold subreddit!.

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