When comparing Twine vs Defold, the Slant community recommends Defold for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Defold is ranked 21st while Twine is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Defold is:
Defold uses Lua, which is regarded as an easy to learn language by most.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to understand
The basics are very easy to grasp, and you can have a basic story up in minutes.
Pro Free for commercial projects
Twine is based on a GPL licence. You are free to download, modify and publish derivatives - even commercially.
Pro Easy to learn
Defold uses Lua, which is regarded as an easy to learn language by most.
Pro Completely free of charge
Software and online dashboard are free of charge.
Pro Good combination of visual editing + code (Lua)
You can do a lot with drag and drop, but you're not limited -- the code (Lua, which is easy to learn) allows you more power than just visual editing usually gives you.
Pro Fast results
Going from idea to result is very important for the creative process.
Pro Visual editor
Pro Very performant
Being crossplatform it is important to work on low end devices.
Pro Easy and fast export for various platforms
Pro Great community
A very active and friendly community in forums.
Pro Source code available
You can download and modify the source code of the Editor and the engine for free.
Pro Collaborative
You can invite friends from the dashboard and create games together.
Pro Hot reload
It allows you to change scripts in a game while it is running live. Common use-cases is to tweak gameplay parameters or to perform debugging on a running game.
Cons
Con Limited to interactive fiction
Twine is specialized to decision-based interactive fiction. Under the hood, a Twine game is just a flowchart for page transitions; the only way to add more complex behavior is to code it from scratch in JavaScript.