GDevelop VS defold

5 × GDevelop Gold license for 12 months

https://gdevelop.io/ <- free, very easy

It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.

Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

And

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...

If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.

[0] Beginner friendly 2D library:

[1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D): https://www.ursinaengine.org/

[3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/

[4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/

I'm not really a game maker, but would like to give a shout out to the fabulous https://gdevelop.io/

It has everything you need, is free and its VISUAL PROGRAMMING is fab...

After they switched to a monthly/annual subscription fee with the release of construct 3, I pretty much threw in the towel and switched over to Gdevelop.

https://github.com/4ian/GDevelop

Open source, completely free, and I can run it as a native application on my computer versus a weird web app. The idea that my game is basically tied to a SaaS is just not OK for me.

gdevelop GitHub releases

Yes that King, the ones who made Candy Crush. They made a game engine source available (open source with the exception that you can't create a competing game engine from it) with full 2D capabilities, tile map support, spine support, shaders, particle systems, UI editor, scene editor, Box 2D and Bullet for physics, hot-reloading, profiling & debugging tools, etc. It also has basic 3D support, although I wouldn't recommend it for anyone making a primarily 3D game. It's written in C++ and uses Lua as the scripting language, and it's easy enough to write native extensions for any platform's language of choice.

looks very neat, but it doesn't really get more OO than JavaFX, does it ? would you call this code functional & idiomatic in any relevant sense of the term? https://github.com/defold/defold/blob/dev/editor/src/clj/edi...

Maybe that's typical in gaming situations, but it has a weird license: https://github.com/defold/defold/blob/1.3.4/LICENSE.txt ("the Defold License version 1.0")

If you paint by some numbers, the Defold repo (https://github.com/defold/defold) has 1k issues, and only 14 prs open, whereas the Godot repo (https://github.com/godotengine/godot) has 5k+ issues and a whopping 1.1k prs open. And a difference of 1500 contributors on Godot, versus 37 total contributors on Defold.