The Defold game engine has recently received an update, adding support for the Teal programming language. Teal is a typed dialect of Lua, which is the default scripting language in Defold. Similar to how TypeScript benefits JavaScript developers, Teal helps improve the code quality and reliability of Lua.
This addition is part of the new initial support for Lua transpilers in the build pipeline. Currently, this support is limited to transpilation and does not include automatic extern generation for Defold's Lua APIs. Consequently, it is better suited for writing type-safe standalone logic rather than interacting directly with the Defold runtime. Nevertheless, Teal does provide the option to manually write the necessary externs.
The latest update (1.81) also introduces the first iteration of an improved camera component. The camera API is now accessible in all scripts, including render scripts and GUI scripts, through the camera namespace. In addition, there is new functionality that allows binding a camera to the renderer, eliminating the need to pass explicit view and projection matrices.
This new update follows the recent 1.8 release, which introduced several useful features and improvements. These include direct access to the Box2D API, new gui.set and gui.get functions, an updated Emscripten, improved rendering performance, fixes for model rendering, and the ability to preview vertex colors in the editor.
For more information or to download the latest version, visit the Defold website.
