How Gaming Mods continue to keep Gaming interesting
An Interview with a popular gaming mod developer
Over the years of gaming, I have been mostly playing games in the way the game developer intended it to be.
The story, levels, puzzles are all drafted by the gaming studios and this all comes into life in the final produced game which we gamers get to play.
But we gamers always have thoughts/suggestions in our minds as we play the game like this level could have been something different, what if we had this weapon to defeat that monster, what if we could have explored that creepy looking house which has the doors locked or what if I had the vehicle to explore the map more.
Some couldn't wait on these thoughts and so they deep dived into the working of a game, tweaking its features, code, graphic textures in order to see their ideas come into life inside the game. This is where gaming mods come into the picture.
Gaming Mods — Definition and Evolution
The definition from Wikipedia states :
A mod (short for “modification”) is an alteration by players or fans of a video game that changes one or more aspects of a video game, such as how it looks or behaves. Mods may range from small changes and tweaks to complete overhauls, and can extend the replay value and interest of the game.
Gaming mods have come a long way. Earlier the tools for making a gaming mod were understood only by programmers or nerdy enthusiasts. It was very complicated and not an easy task to create a mod. Hence mods were not quite prevalent in the early days and also there were issues in installing them as it wrecks your existing game.
Nowadays, you get developer tools, tutorials, and cheat sheets that make the process of creating mods easier and understandable. There are communities, subreddits that support people in developing mods.
One of the famous stories of gaming mods is Counter-Strike.
Counter-Strike was originally a mod from the famous alien shooter game Half-Life. Few gamers/developers wanted to create a small terrorist vs police game in the Half-Life map and this is how Counter-Strike was born. People loved the mod so much that it caught the interest of Valve (the developers of Half-Life) and went on to use that mod to create the game that we know today.
Counter-Strike is now one of the most popular games in the online-gaming and e-sport scene.
Mods today exist for all popular games, some of them being GTA, Minecraft, Star Dew Valley, Skyrim.
I am no expert in developing gaming mods and so I sat down with
Ishan Jalan, who is a UX Designer by profession but loves gaming and also designing gaming mods in his free time.
He has designed mods for the game Star Dew Valley and has made his mods open-source on Github.
Which game are you currently adding mods to? Can you share the links as well to the Github repo and games?
I am developing mods for the game Star Dew Valley and I have made my mods open-source on GitHub. (link for a sample mod)
Why do people do modding? Do people actually make money from it or it’s just sheer passion for the game?
Most do it or at least start out for the passion of the game and the ability to be able to modify it in a way that people would enjoy it.
It’s like making art and sharing it with the world.
Most people do not make money off of it, but some do have a Patreon and Ko-fi where people can donate or pay for early features.
Why do you build mods? What kind of games should allow developers/players to mod the game? How important is this for the community?
I build mods for the reason I mentioned in the previous question. I started out by adding something that I thought should have been part of the vanilla experience. After I saw positive reactions, I went on to do things that are more challenging and are considered ‘after-game-content’.
Games can either officially support modding along with developer support or have community support like Stardew has. It is really up to the developer and/or the community to take it up. The language of the game also dictates how easy it is to mod a game.
I think it breathes new life into games that are old and keeps adding new content for years. Games like Skyrim and Fall out have thrived on the modding community
What language is used to build mods? If there is more than one, which one is preferred?
Depends on the game, Stardew Valley is written in C#, so the mods are in C# and/or Lua. For people who don’t want to code, it is possible to make mods with JSON files and images. C# is great for cross-platform support.
Are there any legends in the modding community? If so, please share their profiles and their interesting facts.
Every game will have their own legends, but only one name comes to mind when it comes to Stardew Valley and that is “Pathoschild” (https://github.com/Pathoschild)
He built the entire modding API for the game and is really great at documentation. He single-handedly made the modding community grow for Stardew Valley.
Is modding popular in India? How many devs have you encountered in this field?
None that I know of, but I’m pretty sure there are plenty at least for other games. Indie games aren’t very popular here because people don’t see the monetary value.
I have met developers from around the world who do game modding. I think you should check out nexusmods.com. It’s the top modding website for you to get an idea.
What is the skill level required for a passionate developer to get into this? What are the prerequisites?
No prerequisites if you want to make artistic or data-heavy contributions since that is as easy as editing textfiles and telling the API what to change, where to change, and how to change. If you want to make deep level changes, you’d need to learn C#. I learned the language from scratch when I started modding in November.
Can you tell more about the developer API which exposes the endpoints for mods?
As I mentioned in the previous question, Pathoschild built and maintained the Stardew modding API called “SMAPI”. It lets developers communicate with the game at low levels.
Which subreddits are popular for modding? Can you share the subreddit for the game to which you are making mods?
We are mostly active on Discord since it is easier to discuss. Have a community with over 50k users some of whom are interested in modding. We get new interested people every day.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SMAPI/
This is the subreddit we made to help people with problems in modding.
Are there any other groups for the modding community in Discord, Mixer, Youtube, Twitch, etc.?
Stardew Valley Discord server: https://discord.gg/aq4YZG
I am not very familiar with other games’ modding communities at this time but it should be very easy to find communities of other games on all these popular platforms. Some of the popular websites for checking out mods and also joining their modding community are:
https://gamemodding.com/en/
https://www.nexusmods.com/
https://www.moddb.com/
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