Hello everyone! I’m new to the game developing world and watching tutorials online and game engines comparisons and everything youtube sends my way about gamedev. 
. I came across Defold, which one of the main selling points is how light and fast the games made with it are.
They have in their website a file size comparison between Defold, Unity and Godot. (here I attach it) and it got me curious about, where does Gdevelop lands in this comparison? How light or heavy are the games made with Gdevelop compare to others engine.
Besides the obvious (I know that the size of the game will depend of how big the game is, and the amount of everything you use in it).
Does anybody has any ideas about it?
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HTML5
ZIP: 254KB
Uncompressed: 812KB
Android
APK: 2.70MB
AAB: 2.62MB
Installed: 9.35MB
iOS
IPA: N/A :(error):
Used a GDevelop empty project 600x800.
Installed APK application size doesn’t include data.
It depends on build tool, ELECTRON packages NPM and CHROMIUM with builds, that’s why EXE it’s 100MB and above.
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The heck does this stuff even mean?
…an empty project size, so? Does that mean their being compressed differently? packaged differently?
…or better yet, does having less size mean that it has less safety protocols, or just stuff that protect and make your finished project run better in general?
Really wish this kind of comparisons would have some actual context or explanation behind them…
…as a consumer, this just feels like some sort of publicity stunt or snake oil.
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Exactly, I thought about all those things also. But is basically one of their selling points (even though is free) among other things, but speed and light weight of games are one of the main. Anyways it just got me curious about it cause the difference is too much.
So to bring kind of like a conclusion here, I had to go and test this by myself. So I did a quick, veeeery quick experiment, so I build a very simple scene with some objects and a bit of logic to it. I made the same thing in Gdevelop, Defold and Godot 4.2.1, to see whats going to happen. And I exported to APK (for Android) from each engine, and these are the results in apk sizes for each one (each one was exported only on the 64 bit architecture)
After installing the apks the sizes changes to:
Defold: 8.83 mb
Godot: 86.53 mb
Gdevelop: 10.56 mb
For how fast the app perform, I can’t really say anything substantial as it was a very simple thing, but I can tell you this, loading from Defold was instant, so much that I though the app was open already and I just “maximize” it. After that Gdevelop was very close to be the same, and with godot there was a noticable difference, but nothing that anyone would care.
So i can see that game engines like Gdevelop and Defold are very optimize for mobile, web and small games, compared to other big enginges.
Now I had to go and find out why then, Godot has such difference in apk size before and after installation for such a simple thing. And I found out that are the Libraries that Godot puts in the apks. I did an APK analizer, and from those 21 MB of Godot’s apk, 18 mb were libraries.
It will be interesting to see how this scale up with a full game, but I’m not going that far, if anyone else who read this is interested you can do it. .
Ok, case closed for me!
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