Modding & Tools

Modding & Tools

So here is the good news: The editor and modding tools for the Wayward Shadows are coming along great and we have made great progress in the last couple of weeks.

The bad news: Surprising no one, we have realized that providing a fully fleshed out modding kit is an enormous amount of work and that it probably won’t be available in the release version right away.

That being said, the goal is to at least provide basic ability to mod the game and then expand upon that post-release.

So, what is the goal for the ‘moddability’ of Wayward Shadows then? In a perfect world I’d like players to be able to mod:

• Hunters

• Vehicles

• Monsters

• Equipment

• Battle Maps

• Events

Naturally some things are more complicated and require more work than others. While changing a hunter’s or monster’s health, name or textures is relatively easy, things like creating new maps or events is quite tricky. I think we’ll be able to provide tools that will let you create your own hunters and vehicles or tweak any stats of the existing hunters.

I’ll try and provide more info on the progress of those individual items in future updates. Now let’s talk about the more difficult things.

Battle Maps

The turn-based combat is a big part of Wayward Shadows and having a good number of fun battle maps to play on is quite important. Creating those takes time, and so far, the process to create new maps has been painfully slow and we have come to the conclusion that we will need a proper map editor that allows us to set up good looking fun maps comfortably and quickly.

This is why most work time this summer has been going into creating a new map editor. Progress has been great, but we are far from finished.

Terrain Painting

Painting the terrain has been one of the main pain points when it comes to how we have been building maps. We decided to do a complete rewrite of the terrain shader and painting system. This resulted in a really nice and easy to use system which makes it actually fun to create new maps and paint terrain.

The benefit of all the code refactoring and rewrites is that we now have a system that is fast and easy to use and can be accessed by modders through the modding kit. Still a ton of work left but if things work out this will allow you to edit any battle map in the game or create new ones.

An additional benefit is that the final maps will now be much smaller in size, resulting in fast download times and less storage space used.

Hex Map Editing

So far, editing of the hex grid of a battle map has been extremely painful and error prone as well. Turns out that typing in all the coordinates manually and then updating the whole map isn't super convenient...

With the new tools it is now super quick and easy to adjust the hex map of a battle map.

Take a look here:

Environment and Enemies

The ability to place enemies, environment objects and other decorations is up next. In the next couple of weeks, we should have that working as well and we can move on to actually setting up behaviors and simple game logic in the editor. This all works already if set up manually in C# but not in a way that a modder could access easily. So hopefully things keep on going well and we can start testing those tools soon.

Tradeoffs

Naturally working on one area in the game takes time away from others. It is always a tradeoff and in the last couple weeks the actual gameplay or art hasn’t gotten much love. Better modding tools are great but they do come at the cost of slower progress in other areas and a possible delayed release date.

That being said, things are looking great. As always, thank you so much for reading this and following the development of Wayward Shadows!