Creating modifiable game worth it?

[BrentR]

I figured I could at least allow users to easily mod the images. But I was considering allowing the users to create whole characters. I want the game to check for a mods folder. Anything in the folder would be used instead. This would involve creating code to allow people to easily create characters. Anyways without getting into details about my thoughts on how I'd do this. I'm curious whether this would be worth it? It's a lot of extra work.

Also has anyone already created anything to streamline the process? Thanks.

[qirien]

This would be a lot of extra work. While I think a lot of players like the option to choose what their character looks like, most players don't have artistic/technical ability/desire to do so.

One option is to release your game open source (ie, don't archive everything up into one big file). This way, if users want to change things, they can, but it doesn't take a lot of extra work from you. Or, you could at least keep the PC sprites open so that people could easily drop in a different sprite if they happened to have one laying around with the right expressions, etc.

I would love to see an open source character creation module with creative commons art that people could use to make characters for games! I would definitely patreon that. But that's big enough that it should probably be its own project.

[BrentR]

One option is to release your game open source (ie, don't archive everything up into one big file). This way, if users want to change things, they can, but it doesn't take a lot of extra work from you. Or, you could at least keep the PC sprites open so that people could easily drop in a different sprite if they happened to have one laying around with the right expressions, etc.

I would love to see an open source character creation module with creative commons art that people could use to make characters for games! I would definitely patreon that. But that's big enough that it should probably be its own project.

I might do the first option and leave it open. Honestly I didn't figure people would create art just use already created art and be like I'm playing a Link or something.

I've been thinking about this some and I'm leaning to some sort of database using external software to manage it. So for example the user would run the character creator which they add images and maybe even specific dialogue depending on how in depth the character creator is. When they are done the frontend character creator program will add the information to the database. Then when the game is run the content in the database could be used. This could be used for npcs as well allowing users to create new content with out coding at all. This also should prevent accidental errors.

I've read that databases don't work great with renpy but if you're only reading data through python code I think it wouldn't be a problem. Not sure I'm still pretty new to renpy.

[qirien]

Sounds interesting! I'm curious to see where you take this. A database might be overkill but could be worth it if it makes things easier to manage. Honestly, editing well-organized .rpy files is not too difficult, though, so you could also just put all the user-editable things in one .rpy file that they can edit if they want to.