Defold is interesting. I’ve used it for a game jam and went through the Zenva courses for it. So I have a little experience, but please correct me if what I’m about to say is wrong.
I like defold but it has problems that pushed me to Love2D. For one, the distinction between a game object and a collection feels unnecessary and because they have slight variations (like how to get their message url) it lead to some confusion I couldn’t get over.
Furthermore, the message based system is odd to me. In theory I love it, but in practice I just couldn’t find a good way to keep things organized. I ended up with a spaghetti mess of messages that I could never keep track of. But that’s likely a me-being-a-shitty-programmer problem.
I do love the performance and tiny export sizes though! Getting builds that small and that performant from Lua is pretty sweet.
Full agree with the licensing and connection to king being dubious. They’re now under the Defold foundation FWIW. Either way, I tried it, and moved on.
I think I’ll be messing with Raylib and C next. I’m already noticing some issues with Lua and Love2D as well that I don’t love. Mostly web builds being a royal PITA.