Hello, everybody! I hope you are having a great time. This post is all about mods. I want TOSOD to be moddable from day one and by anyone.

Mods explained

For those of you who don't know about the modding culture, I will quickly explain what mods are. A mod is normally a bunch of files in an archive that you download from the Internet and extract in a certain folder on your PC, most likely the same folder where your game is installed. As a result, your game gains new functionality, such as new items or quests.

Why and how

I love mods. I believe that, just as you should have options to customize your PC when you buy it or tune your car or many other devices, you should also be able to tune any game you purchase to suit your needs. I thank my years as a Linux user for this philosophy. I want my game to have extensive support for mods from the very first day.

How do we achieve it, though? I don't know a better way than to make the default version of the game a mod. That is, to write all the plot stories, quests, enemies, cutscenes, locations, and everything else as a default mod. By doing that, I am pioneering a path that later modders could easily follow. Technically, it means that the whole game's plot and most of the content will be written as a JSON file.

Above is a simplified example of what I am trying to achieve. Contrary to most RPGs, 100% of TOSOD plot content will be written in a JSON file. This is challenging, and literally no one else does that, but being a senior software developer with something like seven years of tough Eastern European programming experience, I believe I can pull that off.

Conclusion and v1.1.4

Today, I finished the version 1.1.4 of TOSOD, incorporating the fixes for bugs found during the playtesting of the version 1.0.0 on the game's Discord server: stable FPS, no mouse cursor, and better keyboard navigation. Aside from that, the version 1.1.4 is the first version to have a menu section for mods that works as a mod loader. As usual, there are many things to improve, but I am happy with what is already there. Below is a screenshot of the modding section. Thanks for reading this far. Stay tuned, join the game’s Discord server, and follow me on Twitter.