SV Mod Loader and Future Plans

I haven’t released any games lately, partly because I’ve been busy, but also because I plan to create a set of reusable UI elements for my future games to save dev time in the long run. One of these is SV Mod Loader, releasing v1 today - a GUI and framework for loading mods in .pck format that you can include in your Godot Engine games.

Get it on GitHub!

When I made Advanced Invasion I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time developing and polishing the various UI elements towards the end. Partly, my own perfectionism is to blame. Despite Advanced Invasion being - by design - an incredibly simple game, I wanted to include all sorts of bells and whistles including an achievements system, jukebox, and reasonably fully-featured options menu (although I neglected to include controls settings in the end because it was already taking too long (and there’s also an about menu for license compliance btw but that’s not as fun)).

These kinds of periphiral elements - at least I believe - add a lot of substance to a game. It gets even better when you include stuff like level editors, concept art menus, etc. Consequently, I’m quite keen on including at least a jukebox, achievements, and options screen in all my future games.

So, to save time, I want to create these various elements in advance so I can just drop them into future games. One of the first I wanted to tackle - primarily because it’s the most difficult - is a mod loader.

Now, this probably sounds a bit OTT considering that a perfectly good option already exists, and in fact I would recommend most people use that option instead. But, for an upcoming project I may or may not do, I’d like to have a few specific features. Specifically, I want a good way of distributing required asset packs separately from the source code, and this might as well hook into a modding system. This is good if, like me, you’re an open source game developer and, on occasion, you need to deal with proprietary assets.

Consequently, one of the main selling point of SV Mod Loader is the ability to configure checksums for official or required mods and verifying that you have the real deal before launching the game. Other than that, the system is pretty rudimentary. It just uses the normal methods for loading .pck files.

Other than that there’s a couple exxtra bells and whistles. The UI includes an inbuilt load order editor, with the ability for uses to create and manage multiple different mod lists. There’s an about menu you can use to show important information e.g. licenses before launching the game, and you can customise a lot of elements of the mod loader through exported variables.

Overall, I don’t really expect this to be that useful to anybody. There are much more stable and mature alternatives out there, after all. But, if your needs just happen to be similar to mine, you might find it interesting. In that case, it’s open source and you can get it on GitHub.