Hello, everyone! I’m Maksim, and we run a two-person company with @aglitchman. Last year, I had thoughts about making a 🎅 game with Defold that will use 2d physics and physics joints in an enjoyable way. I came up with the 🎅 idea of implementing a soft body in Defold. Also, I wanted to use the physics API provided by the engine 🎅 without any external native extensions. I managed to do it, and I want to point to this tutorial because it 🎅 helped me a lot in this task.
So, I got a soft blob-like thing, and I was tossing with it in 🎅 a prototype for a very long time. It turned out that it’s tough to invent something new. Finally, I got 🎅 an idea of a fat cat that likes to blow balloons. The name of the game is Puffy Cat, and 🎅 I’ll be glad if you play it on Poki!
The final version of the game has 150 levels, 26 hats, 18 🎅 balloon skins, 225 sprites, 35 sound fx, and plenty of fun! And we agreed with the publisher to make two 🎅 more games in the Puffy Cat series with new game mechanics and content.
What I like the most about Defold is 🎅 that:
I use Defold IDE to make levels, i.e. I have quite a few pre-made game objects to construct a level. 🎅 Every level is a collection with references to these game objects. All these levels linked to the parent collection as 🎅 Defold’s collection factories. It’s an easy way to make levels without any external editors like Tiled etc.
All I need to 🎅 run a game from sources is to download Defold IDE and build/run a project.
Amazing build time and the run-fix-restart-fix-restart-… loop. 🎅 I absolutely agree with the slogan: “Spend time making games, not waiting for builds!”.
Defold has the CLI tool bob.jar that 🎅 we use for CI to make debug builds for internal use, and release builds for the publisher.
that we use for 🎅 CI to make debug builds for internal use, and release builds for the publisher. Defold has free source code access, 🎅 and that gives, especially for us, two important things. First, the engine is not a black box, and if something 🎅 doesn’t work as you expect, you can look into the source code and find the answer. The second is that 🎅 you can propose any useful changes, and we added the Weld joint to the engine that we’re going to use 🎅 in the next part of Puffy Cat.
Gotchas
While the development I faced this issue, but I managed to fix it by 🎅 moving a reference to a common large collection from levels collections to a parent collection.
In-game physics is tuned up to 🎅 run with a fixed timestep on 16.67ms (60fps) or less. Otherwise, objects could fall through each other. We set display.vsync 🎅 = on, display.update_frequency = 60, and it turned out to be an issue because the game runs in “slow-mo mode” 🎅 if a player has really slow hardware. @aglitchman did a temporary workaround for this. To sum up, it will be 🎅 awesome if a developer can write his own “gameloop script” to control update/physics/render steps. @aglitchman will write his thoughts soon, 🎅 I think.
Acknowledgements
I use the following dependencies in the game:
https://github/Insality/druid - for GUI. It saves lots of time!
https://github/britzl/defold-orthographic to control aspect 🎅 ratio and scale, convert window/world coordinates.
https://github/britzl/defold-input to interact with bodies using triggers.
https://github/britzl/ludobits - flow greatly simplifies game logic.
greatly simplifies game 🎅 logic. https://github/subsoap/defos for the local development to resize and center game’s window on Windows.
https://github/subsoap/defsave to store saves in LocalStorage .
. 🎅 https://github/AGulev/defold-poki-sdk to implement Poki API.
https://github/rxi/lume - it’s a useful collection of functions for Lua.
https://github/indiesoftby/defold-sharp-sprite to make graphics look sharp at 🎅 any screen resolution from Apple’s Retina to old PC’s 720p screens.
https://github/indiesoftby/defold-liveupdate-reszip to implement lazy loading of game resources.
https://github/GameAnalytics/GA-SDK-DEFOLD to track 🎅 Lua errors.
Thanks @Insality, @AGulev, @britzl, @Pkeod, the great Defold community! And the Defold team for the engine, of course. I 🎅 didn’t face any blocking bugs or issues while developing the game!
The great in-game artwork was done by Tatiana Guleva.
