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Defold
Lightweight cross-platform engine backed by King
free Solo-dev friendly
Defold is a free, source-available game engine originally built by King (Candy Crush). Focused on 2D games with Lua scripting. Produces tiny binaries and runs smoothly on low-end devices — ideal for mobile and web games.
Highlights
- + Extremely small build sizes — perfect for web and mobile
- + Battle-tested in production by King games
- + Simple Lua scripting with message-passing architecture
- + Built-in hot reload and live device testing
Limitations
- − 3D support is minimal and experimental
- − Smaller community than Godot or Unity
- − Lua is less popular — fewer transferable skills
Platforms
Windows macOS Linux Web Mobile