Have you ever thought it weird that a lot of game developers do not release the tools they use to the modding community?<\/p>\n
You might be tempted, in these cynical ‘game devs are bastards’ times, to suspect that this is a deliberate move by evil game devs to make modding harder, so they can sell more DLC and expansion packs. I guess that it might be true in some cases, but I think that the history of PC gaming would suggest quite clearly that a well served and popular modding community is a sales booster for a game.<\/p>\n
I have my own theory, and its simply that professional game developers tools are crap.<\/p>\n
I’ve always been amazed at how good the tools are that modders put together. Someone even did an editor for some aspect of Democracy that was better than any tools I had. I am notoriously crap at doing tools, and often hack things together using Excel and notepad. It’s really quite tragic.<\/p>\n
The reasoning for why the actual developers on a game produce such poor quality tools may include the following<\/p>\n
And of course this is all applicable to big budget games. With small one man companies like me, the situation is far worse. Literally every minute I spend on tools is time not on the core game. Also tools effectiveness scales with the size of the game. A tool that speeds up 400 hours of level design is worth more up-front effort than one which might save 20 hours work.<\/p>\n
My tools do actually exist (as special hidden modes of the main game) but they are very, very basic, hacky and bad. Don’t be surprised if they aren’t released on the same day as the game :D<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Have you ever thought it weird that a lot of game developers do not release the tools they use to the modding community? You might be tempted, in these cynical ‘game devs are bastards’ times, to suspect that this is a deliberate move by evil game devs to make modding harder, so they can sell<\/p>\n