Defold Engine: Migration tips from Godot

I recently participated in Defold 2026 Game Jam, to learn a little bit about the Defold Game Engine. Defold is a quite competent Game Engine that uses Lua as scripting language, and it is especially making games for the web, where resources are quite more limited and the game benefits a lot more in being lightweight.

Defold has a great introduction for Unity users here: https://defold.com/manuals/unity/, and it is still quite a useful read even if you're coming from Godot. But there are some "clicks" that I had developing my game in Defold (a simple puzzle game you can play here) that I decided to write about a little bit, to help out if you're coming from Godot and you want to give Defold a spin.

But before some tips, a quick breakdown on choosing Godot or Defold:

Why picking Defold instead of Godot

• Much lighter on web. Unless you're making a custom exporter in Godot to strip out the parts you don't need and optimize for size, your game is bound to have at least tens of megabytes at minimum. In Defold, an empty project occupies 1mb (even less if you optimize).
• Minimalist engine. Godot is quite easy to learn, but one common problem is that there are many Nodes to check, which might overwhelm people learning the Engine. In Defold, number of resource "types" is much shorter, so learning a couple of things goes a long way.
• Lua VS GDscript. I honestly like GDScript, but I see the value of using a generic scripting language that is also used in many other Engines, which helps bringing reusability to things created in Defold.

... and when you should NOT pick Defold:

• Much lighter also means there are not many pre-built elements, like the many types of nodes in Godot. If you know what Godot can offer and want to build something in a short amount of time, you might better stay with Godot.
• Unlike the very robust Godot UI system, the built-in game UI elements Defold has is really simple. You might need to build your own UI system or download a plugin.
• If you're ape-coding, learning about Defold does require digging a bit more in the documentation, forums, tutorials and examples. Godot documentation is much more easier to access, and it's included in Godot itself.

Some Defold clicks coming from Godot