Mod Devs: Best experience modding a game?

[DeviantDev]

Hello!

 

I'm developing an NSFW Unity game and looking to set up modding support. I'd love to know games or mod systems have made your modding life the most enjoyable. Ideally, it would be a service or store asset that comes with a Unity plugin for a modding API, but any good experience with a Mod platform and especially what made it good would be great to hear about for research purposes.

 

Thanks!

[Guest]

First of all, make sure all "mods" will stay in a specific folder.

Usually also having the mod itself put as a folder is not a bad idea.

Then consider the assets you are using. Let's start with a simple one: Textures.

Your game will use some for sure. They are referenced somewhere in the data of the compiled game (packed) or visible as loose files. A "mod" should be able to identify this asset (ID or Path) and provide a new version of it.

If you go with paths, then the mod just need to add the file in a correct path, then the game itself should consider if a replacement of an asset exists in the mod folder to load it.

If you go with IDs, then you can have the IDs directly in the name of the file, or have a master table somewhere that associates the IDs to the actual assets. The mod should provide in this case, a sub-table for the IDs replaced.

 

For other assets the situation goes more and more complex. How will you add a new "Scene"? That should be carefully selected when you design your game structure and items.

 

For "scripting" you can only rely on your game engine (Unity) and provide some APIs to call your actual exposed functions to the modders.

[DeviantDev]

Wow, great info, thank you! I especially love the details about how to set up the mod folder structure and path name overrides for things like textures. I should be able to set something like that up and running. I'm also hoping to support a UI in-game to load mods.

 

Luckily I've got a pretty good solution for the scripting language already. All content is loaded and triggered via Ink Script by Inkle:

https://inklestudios.com/ink

 

You can actually test and play through ink scripts without the game client at all. For instance, we test scripts out and get feedback here:

https://deviant-dev.github.io/dominatrix-simulator-ink

 

All the "/command"s are there to trigger stuff on the game side. I'm hoping to find a way to load and compile raw scripts straight from the shared assets folder while the game is running so it can be updated and testing in realtime.

 

As for larger 'combined' assets like scenes and characters, I'm hoping to eventually get to the point where I can have some mod tools that will let people create their own using a free copy of Unity. Definitely a longer-term goal, though. Eventually, I'd love all content including the main game to run exclusively from the moddable Shared Assets folder.

 

Thanks for the reply!!