How we made the biggest game on Defold in 1 year

What the talk is about

Mykola Armonik explains how a small team built a large mobile farm game, Family Island, on the Defold engine in one year, and why they chose it. Unity, Unreal and C++ were ruled out because of risk and the project's 2D nature; Defold won on fast prototyping and its similarity to an in-house engine. He gives the scale: about 150 person-months, hundreds of Lua modules, 150+ JSON files, 200+ MB of art, 4,000+ objects per frame, and 15–60 fps depending on the device. He walks through problems and fixes: dynamic loading of buildings, cluster-based pathfinding, fps drops from autosaving, and cutting draw calls from about 1,700 to about 100, plus a custom content editor and export tool. He closes with Defold's pros and cons and thoughts on writing your own engine. Useful for programmers and tech leads choosing an engine for a 2D project.