Include modding support + Pick a modding language/framework

[Lamby777]

Somewhere in the near future, the game should support easy modding.

I'm thinking of using something like https://mod.io/, but maybe could
just be a Lua runtime with functions provided. Don't know. It's a little
too early to start working on this, in case requirements change later and
all the work will be for nothing.

[Lamby777]

Just found out from their pricing page (didn't even know they had paid plans) that it's not open-source unless you pay. OOF. Also, you need to contact them to even get a price, so I'm not sure if it's one-time or a subscription and tbh too nervous to ask em (tf am I gonna say if they tell me it's a subscription? just stop responding?).

Well, I've learned from writing Roblox scripts and switching to Neovim that everyone, including newbies who just want to get their ideas on the screen, tend to love Lua. It's a very accessible language, and is easy to embed + doesn't suck for typings like JS/Python (though it's still dynamically typed... sadge)

There's also the option of "rolling our own" scripting language, but I'm strongly against this unless it's really necessary. Godot is a whole game engine, and there are already people saying GDScript is too much and they should have stuck with C# or whatever. Really disagree there, but my opinion on that doesn't really matter if those are the types of people who might be writing mods for this game.

Maybe... just maybe, I could somehow implement a thing that accepts TypeScript code and transpiles it at load-time? Or maybe, much less complexity: require that mods only export at most 1 JavaScript file so that it'd be really easy to write mods in TypeScript...? I don't want to support JS unless I also make it equally easy to make mods in TS (i REALLY hate when games have a JS modding api and act like TS doesn't exist).

Or the alternative option, only support TS and piss off all the newbies /s <3

[Lamby777]

and yeah this might seem like bikeshed, but you also gotta remember that some things might be REALLY hard to make em easy to mod later on, and I want this game to be really moddable, so that's not something to compromise on and "think later" about.

[Lamby777]

Since it's open-source, could just make a tool that uses git merge under the hood but makes it easy for non-techy people to install mods. It could grab the mod icon and name from a manifest file at the repo root folder or something. Only issue is merge conflicts.