T w e n t y S i d e d
I write the story on Sunday, the story changes on Monday, and it’s all moot by the time the story runs on Tuesday.
Ah well.
I still say letting us link a PayPal button to a mod and put it near the “subscribe” button would be a classy thing for Valve to do. Nobody takes a cut except PayPal. Yeah, the vast majority of modders will make nothing, but I think a few of the big ones might see a meaningful return.
But it doesn’t matter. Looks like we’re doing a return to the status quo.
So let’s talk about modding:
In my mind modding falls into two broad categories: Passive and encouraged.
Passive is when the developer doesn’t make any special effort to discourage modding. They just leave the image data, scripts, and audio files exposed in the game directories instead of obscuring them.
Encouraged is when the developer gives their developer tools away to the community specifically so they can mod the game. This is assuming that game-specific tools even exist. In a lot of games – particularly in the bad old days before Unreal Engine, Unity, etc. – artists just had to edit text files and run obscure command-line scripts to put their assets into the game, and the process was too involved, buggy, and technical that offering the tools to the public would just create a ton of additional work for the devs.
Good Robot will probablyCan’t make any promises. Anything can happen during development and I don’t want someone come back saying I LIED to you if we change our minds. allow modding (nobody on the team wants to discourage it) but it will very much be a case of passive modding. Every change will be either trivial or impossible. The game rules (robots, movement speeds, damage, colors, level ordering) are stored in dead-simple text files, and the game textures are regular PNG files. You can add a new robot to the game. You can add new textures to the sprite sheet. But there’s no way to change the game logic. You can’t add a companion robot, or a new AI behavior, or a timed game mode.
Exposing game logic to non-coders is powerful, but also a ton of work. You need to make an interpreter for some sort of sandboxed scripting language. I’ve been reading Game Programming Design Patterns lately and it has a chapter dedicated to the topic. It looks like fun, but it also looks like something I don’t want to mess with on something designed to be a low-risk, straightforward design.
