My last post I introduced this idea of building a sandbox game that is mod friendly. What does this “mod friendly” actually mean? Isn’t decompiling the game’s executable and editing the source code considered as supporting mods? Not quite. Decompiling is obviously a way to mod games, as Minecraft and Terraria have proven, but it is still far from being truly mod friendly. To be fair, these games were built by very small teams (1 and 2 people respectively) and being mod friendly can be a lofty goal. To me, mod friendly means to make creating, sharing, and managing mods as simple as possible for the average player.
Creating mods will be simple and fast but still provide much flexibility for those with big plans. Tools will be provided to help perform the more basic tasks such as setting up a mod. Adding content will be as simple as creating a new file, typing in a few lines, saving the file, and then loading it up in the game. No compiling will be required. One goal I have is to make it possible to reload content in game to help streamline the creation process. No restarting necessary!
The provided mod tools will help with packaging up a mod as well. Once packaged a player simply has to drop the mod package into their directory and the game will take care of the rest. We are also considering providing an official hub to upload mods to. Eventually, if the game gets onto Steam, we would love to support Steam Workshop. This is a service provided by Steam that allows players to easily share, search, and subscribe to game mods.
Players will be given the ability to enable/disable mods and even completely remove the mods all in game. The goal is to minimize the amount the player has to manage mods externally. We even have plans to make the multiplayer host (aka server) provide any missing mods to joining players.
The way that we will ensure that this game is truly mod friendly is by dogfooding it. All of the game content will actually be a mod to the game. With this philosophy we will be able to ensure that nothing is hardcoded and nearly every single aspect of the game can be modified. This won’t just include the basics such as items, monsters and tiles. It will include much more such as biomes, NPCs, character customization, and eventually the ability to add entirely new systems to the game.
In my next post I will go into the more technical side of how the game will be made mod friendly.