Dev Diary: Modding

We’ve been reluctant to tackle modding for a long time because it would require refactoring almost the entire project, which would mean months of tedious work. And for people to actually want to make mods, we’d also need an editor with lots of quality-of-life features and explanations. None of these things are particularly difficult to implement, but there’s a lot of them, so it would take quite a while.

However, AI is a good fit for tasks that require minimal creativity but involve a lot of repetitive work and keeping track of a large amount of context (to avoid introducing a ton of bugs). What would have taken several months of work can now be done in weeks. The initial results are still far from perfect and require a lot of polishing to address all the little details AI missed, but the time and effort saved are already obvious. And to be fair, Claude sometimes does a better job with UI/UX than our own team =D

That said, we’d be very interested to hear your expectations to help guide further development. Some things are relatively easy to implement: creating new resources/buildings/weapons/armor based on existing ones, tweaking basic parameters like crafting costs, stack sizes, damage, etc. But editing behavior logic or adding a new profession already looks much more challenging, both in terms of implementing mod support (although GameMaker does offer certain ways to load and execute code from external files) and potential performance impact (we’re still doing some additional research to find a less costly approach). It would also mean that modders would need to know GML and understand our project’s codebase to make changes.

Perhaps a full-fledged scripting system won’t be necessary, and a limited set of additional functions that can be used in specific places will be enough. If we manage to load external code without a significant performance hit, we’re also considering putting together a detailed guide that you could feed to an AI and simply vibe-code your mods.

So, a few questions for you:

1. What kind of mods would you like to make if the opportunity was there?
2. What features and tools would you like to see in the modding toolkit?
3. How deeply would you be willing to dive into the project to create mods? Would you prefer to just tweak numbers/images for in-game entities, add new ones, or go as far as editing scripts?

Your answers will help us make modding as useful and convenient as possible!