Manuals

A brief introduction to Defold.

This manual explains how to download and install the Defold editor for your operating system.

This manual lists everything that you encounter working in Defold with a brief description.

This guide presents Defold as an alternative for Flash game developers. It covers some of the key concepts used in Flash game development, and explains the corresponding tools and methods in Defold.

This guide helps quickly switch to Defold if you have prior experience with Unity. It covers some of the key concepts used in Unity, and explains the corresponding tools and methods in Defold.

This manual describes how to get help if you run into a problem while using Defold.

This manual covers how to create or open a project in Defold.

This manual describes how project specific settings work in Defold.

The Libraries feature allows you to share assets between projects. This manual explains how it works.

This manual describes how to ignore files and folders in Defold.

This manual gives an overview on how the Defold editor look and works, and how to navigate in it.

This manual briefly covers how to work with code in Defold.

You can add your own custom project templates to the New Project window.

This manual explains how to extend editor using Lua

This manual explains how to create UI elements in the editor using Lua

This manual explains the debugging facilities present in Defold.

You can modify the settings of the editor from the Preferences window.

This manual covers how you can change the structure of your project easily with the help of powerful refactoring.

You can modify the colors, typography and other visual aspects of the editor using a custom stylesheet.

This manual covers how to import and edit assets.

This manual explains how to use the asset cache to speed up builds.

This manual covers how to import and use 2D graphics.

This manual covers how to import 3D models used by the model component.

This manual explains how to adapt your game and graphics to different screen sizes.

The Live update functionality provides a mechanism allowing the runtime to fetch and store resources to the application bundle that were intentionally left out of the bundle at build time. This manual explains how it wor...

This manual explains how Atlas resources work in Defold.

This manual explains how Buffer resources work in Defold.

This manual describes how Defold handles fonts and how to bring fonts onto the screen in your games.

This manual explains how Defold automatically manages resources and how you can manually manage loading of resources to adhere to memory footprint and bundle size constraints.

This describes how to use and create a tile source.

This manual describes the available options for texture filtering when rendering graphics.

Defold supports automatic texture processing and compression of image data. This manual describes the available functionality.

This manual describes Defold's animation support.

This manual describes how to use flipbook animations in Defold.

This manual describes how to use 3D model animations in Defold.

This manual describes how to use property animations in Defold.

This manual describes how to show Rive animations using the Rive extension.

This manual explains how to bring Spine animations from _Spine_ into Defold.

This manual gives an overview of the components and how to use them.

This manual explains how to use collection factory components to spawn hierarchies of game objects.

This manual explains how to dynamically create new game worlds and switch between them.

A collision object is a component you use to give a game object physical behaviour. A collision object has physical properties and a spatial shape.

This manual describes the functionality of the Defold camera component.

This manual explains how to use factory components to dynamically spawn game objects at runtime.

This manual explains how to use label components to use text with game objects in the game world.

This manual describes how to create 3D meshes at run-time in your game.

This manual describes how to bring 3D models, skeletons and animations into your game.

This manual explains how the particle fx component works and how to edit it to create visual particle effects.

This manual describes how to show Rive animations using the Rive extension.

This manual explains how you bring sounds into your Defold project, play back and control them.

This manual explains how to bring Spine animations from _Spine_ into Defold.

This manual describes how to show 2D images and animations using the sprite component.

This manual details Defold's support for tile maps.

This manual goes through the Defold GUI editor, the various types of GUI nodes and GUI scripting.

This manual explains how to use GUI box nodes.

This manual describes how to add text to GUI scenes.

This manual explains how to use pie nodes in Defold GUI scenes.

This manual explains how to bring Spine animations from _Spine_ into Defold.

This manual explains how particle effects work in the Defold GUI.

This manual explains the Defold GUI template system that is used to create reusable visual GUI components based on shared templates or 'prefabs'.

This manual explains GUI scripting.

This manual describes how to create GUI nodes that mask other nodes through stencil clipping.

Defold supports GUIs that automatically adapt to screen orientation changes on mobile devices. This document explains how the feature works.

Defold includes physics engines for 2D and 3D. They allow you to simulate Newtonian physics interactions between different types of collision objects.

A collision component can either use several primitive shapes or a single complex shape.

The physics engine allows you to group your physics objects and filter how they should collide.

When two objects collide, the engine will call the event callback or broadcast messages.

Collision event handling can be centralized by using `physics.set_event_listener()` to direct all collision and interaction messages to a single specified function.

This manual explains how to resolve kinematic physics collisions.

Ray casts are used to read the physics world along a linear ray. This manual explains how this works.

Defold supports joints for 2D physics. This manual explains how to create and work with joints.

This manual explains how to stream sounds into the Defold game engine

Guide to integrating the FMOD audio middleware with Defold projects.

This manual explains how input works, how to capture input actions and create interactive script reactions.

This manual explains how key and text input works.

This manual explains how mouse and touch input works.

This manual explains how gamepad input works.

This manual describes how to add game logic using script components.

This manual explains what types of properties exist in Defold, and how they are used and animated.

This manual explains how to add custom properties to script components and access them from the editor and runtime scripts.

This manual will give a quick introduction to the basics of Lua programming in general and what you need to consider when working with Lua in Defold.

This manual will cover a number of areas related to secure development practices.

Lua modules allow you to structure your project and create reusable library code. This manual explains how to do that in Defold.

This manual explains the debugging facilities present in Defold.

This manual explains how to save and load files and perform other kinds of file operations.

This manual explains how to connect to remote servers and perform other kinds of network connections.

This manual explains how to make HTTP requests.

This manual explains how to connect to create socket connections.

This manual covers how to use websockets with Defold

This manual explains how to connect to different game and backend services.

This manual will cover a number of areas related to secure development practices.

This manual covers how to create an application bundle.

Bob is a command line tool for building Defold projects. This manual explains how to use the tool.

This manual explains the hot reloading feature in Defold.

This manual highlights some things to consider when porting a game to a new platform or when releasing your game for the first time.

This manual explains how to put the development app on your device for iterative development on device.

This manual covers how to work with the built-in version control system.

This manual describes how to work offline in projects containing dependencies and in-particular native extensions

This manual explains how to debug native code in Defold.

This manual describes how to debug a build using Android Studio.

This manual describes how to debug a build using Xcode.

This manual explains how to read game and system logs.

This manual describes how to optimize a Defold game for size and performance.

This manual describes how to optimize the size of a Defold game.

This manual describes how to optimize a Defold game to run at a stable high frame rate.

This manual describes how to optimize battery usage a Defold game.

This manual describes how to optimize memory usage of a Defold game.

This manual explains the profiling facilities present in Defold.

This manual describes how to build and run Defold applications on Android devices

This manual covers how to get the advertising id and status on iOS and Android in Defold.

This manual covers how to use AdMob to show ads on iOS and Android in Defold.

This manual covers how to use the Android Device Performance Framework in Defold

This manual covers how to setup and use iOS and Android native review and rating popups in Defold.

This manual covers how to use the camera on macOS, iOS and Android in Defold.

This manual covers how to setup and use Facebook in Defold.

This manual covers how to setup and use Firebase Analytics in Defold.

This manual covers how to setup and use Firebase Remote Config in Defold.

This manual covers how to setup and use Google Play Game Services in Defold.

This manual explains how to create Google Play Instant game with Defold.

Inter-app communication allows you to pick up on the launch arguments used when starting your application. This manual explains Defold's API available for this functionality.

This manual covers how to get use IronSource ad mediation to show ads on iOS and Android in Defold.

This manual covers how to setup and use push notifications in Defold.

This manual covers how to download and use additional asset packs using Play Asset Delivery.

Extension to change the view of a game to fit into the safe area on iOS and Android devices with notch.

WebViews allows you to load and display web pages as overlays in your games. They can also run user supplied JavaScript in the background. This manual explains Defold's official WebView extension, API and functionality.

This manual explains how to build and run games and apps on iOS devices in Defold.

This manual describes how to get Nintendo Switch access

This manual describes how to get PlayStation®4 and PlayStation®5 access

This manual describes how to get Microsoft Xbox access

This manual describes the process of creating HTML5 game, along with known issues and limitations.

This manual covers how to integrate and use the CrazyGames SDK in Defold.

This manual covers how to setup and create games for Facebook Instant Games using Defold.

This manual covers how to integrate and use the Poki SDK in in Defold.

This manual explains how to write a native extension for the Defold game engine and how to compile it through the zero setup cloud builders.

This manual describes how to work with the Defold SDK when creating native extensions.

This manual explains how to use Gradle to resolve dependencies in Android builds.

This manual explains how to use CocoaPods to resolve dependencies in iOS and macOS builds.

This manual explains how to create a script API definition so that the Defold editor can provide auto-complete for users of an extension.

This manual describes best practices when developing native extensions.

This manual describes the extension manifest and how it correlates to the application manifest and engine manifest.

This manual describes how the app manifest can be used to exclude features from the engine.

This manual describes how the merging of application manifests work

External Lua C API reference for advanced native extension and low-level Lua integration work.

Manual described how to setup and run local build server

Document described available Docker images and Defold versions that used it