Otome Journal # 1 - Hello Defold!
Getting my start with Defold.
GAME JOURNALS - UNTITLED DEFOLD GAME
HaxDev
10/25/2026
Hello everyone. Here we are again, back with game development once more. It's been over a year since I last made any changes to Joe Maverick. And why? You know why...
I HATE UNREAL ENGINE!!!!
...Yup. I put up with it for years because I took so much time to learn it, and it's free, and EVERYONE is using it, and wow there's no royalties under 1 million dollars, isn't that rad? But I just couldn't take it anymore.
So to clarify: I did not get tired of Joe Maverick, I did not get tired of game development, but I did get very, very tired of using Unreal Engine. I'm never touching it again.
Well, if you've been here a while this is old news to you. You may also remember that I was flirting with the idea of using a different engine called RPG Architect. Well, I'm here to tell you today that it didn't pan out, either, and for a rather simple reason:
I tried to create a variable for a stat that was a float and could not. Yes, that made me crash out. The developer told me to "just use a formula to divide it by 100 so you get a decimal" but really, shouldn't you have the option to just input it from the beginning. Why so roundabout? Yeah, it's an extra 4 bytes to have it as a double instead of an integer, fine. But can't we at least have the option??
And so, I was engine homeless for quite a bit. I tried another one called RPG Maker Bakin, but I faced the same issue with the float/integer thing. Apparently ALL canned RPG makers only allow you to use integers. For some reason. Not to mention a ton of the documentation was only in Japanese, and it only exported to Windows. It seemed dire for me. I wanted the freedom of Unreal Engine with none of the downsides. Did such a thing even exist? I'd heard mixed things about both Unity and Godot, and I really didn't want to use either. So I was stuck, again.
While I was stuck, I got the idea for this JRPG game. I jokingly made a post on Twitter where I asked if anyone would be interested in me making an otome game, and almost 5 thousand people liked it. That's a lot of people... so I figured it'd be a nice, small project to make when I finally found the engine I wanted. (I already know the pain of learning-as-you go, and I didn't want to repeat it when I made Joe Maverick again.) For this game in particular, I wanted live2D esque images. Here is an example:
Do you see how smooth her animation is? Game engines have been using this feature a lot recently. I really wanted to make a game with this feature, so I looked up engines that could support it. There weren't too many...
But then one stood out to me, called Defold. Defold is open-source, can export to just about anything (Switch, Xbox, Ps5, pc, android, mac, etc), and is very VERY small. I was interested, so I looked more into it. Long story short, it looked to be a perfect fit! So I started learning it this week.
The biggest pain was getting familiar with Lua, which is what Defold uses. It's much, much simpler than C++. Good for most people, head-scratching for me. To declare a variable, you just type it and hit = whatever. You don't define what it is (bool, int, float, etc) beforehand. Indexing starts at 1 instead of 0. And EVERYTHING data wise is in a table. There aren't any sets, arrays, maps, or structs. Strange, very strange... I felt like my brain was melting trying to follow a tutorial lol. One thought: How can you add a string to a table of integers?? You can. You just can. Because tables are just containers. Very, VERY strange.
But after learning the Lua basics, I've got to say. I'm completely in love with this engine. One of the most annoying things in Unreal was having to pass over SO much data between blueprints. There was this one bug I could never find in battle mode because of this. There was just SO much data and functions, and browsing it all was a pain. It was a PTA trying to get anything to work the way I wanted. But with defold, you just use messages to pass data. So instead of passing over a variable value, you pass over a message that accesses it. It's great.
Anyway, that's all to say that I've started making this untitled game in Defold. And if you're surprised that it's also a dating game, don't be. I'm a girl, you know.
I've updated the website a bit so the game's on the front page. In the future, I'll have to change it again if I add another game... but that's the future, not now.
I'll be back soon with more updates!