This could be putting the cart before the horse or maybe not…
Games that become popular often are or become moddable, the question is what came first the popularity or the modability?
Also if you start developing a game with a more data driven or moddable approach would this improve development and iteration times and allow for the game to become a more fun product faster.
Or for the search/prototyping of fun playability to move faster and find a local maxima (maximise) quickly.
So do you use a modular data driven approach to game design?
If you do what benefits does it give you?
If you don’t have you considered it and what would be the downsides of this approach to game development?
PS: What are the best approaches to moddable adaptable game development?
Considering that there are like 3 games ever with mods on consoles, which is where the majority of games are sold, I’m not sure I completely agree with this statement (and I say that as a PC gamer).
That aside, I’d imagine it depends on the type of game. Some systems-driven games do very well with mods, so I could see taking it into account there.
It’s just referring to how a games rules define it, ‘meta rules’ would be elements of the game you build in that are not setup as configurable rules e.g. the number of players in pong is not written into a configurable slot in most implementations of the game, or it’s a meta/unwritten rule of pong.
Alright. I was actually thinking about doing something similar for a simple prototype where I’m trying to get decent movement for a 3rd person controller. Having an options menu where a player can change base speed or the acceleration curve or the angle they can attack at, stuff like that.
I think in such circumstances the primary consideration is the difficulty of creating those features vs. how many people would use them. And that probably depends on the type of game as well. An RPG where you define your character probably fits well for allowing the user to create/share scenarios. A tightly choreographed action game where you’ve fine-tuned the way the character acts and the enemies’ attack patterns, and designed levels with that in mind, and the player’s main interaction is in learning tricks and shortcuts? Maybe not so much.
In fact, if you look at things a certain way you might think of an RPG’s freedom of expression as a form of “modding” already built into the game, or allowing the user to mess with these so-called “meta rules.”