Modular Godot

What is Modular Godot?

Modular Godot is a free and open-source plugin for the Godot game engine that makes mod support fully automatic. Just add it to the addons folder, click "enable plugin," and you are ready to make moddable games! Add a folder titled "Mods" next to the game executable, and the plugin with automatically find and load any Godot pack files it finds there. Give it a try, and make your next game moddable by default!

How does it work?

This plugin handles the three major types of mods, and differentiates between them with a simple flag file.

1. ModType_AutoLoad:  Do you want an open-ended framework that will support any crazy ideas that your fans have? Then this mod variant is for you! A mod pack simply needs to contain a scene with a specific name (details in the documentation), and the mod system will load the scene as a singleton when the game starts.  The tic tac toe game and art viewer are examples of this in the demo project.
2. ModType_SelectAny: Do you want to add more choices to your game, but you're worried that new users might be overwhelmed by the amount of content? Use a Select Any mod to allow all, none, or some of the content to be loaded into the game. Users can enable any number of mod variants simultaneously. The "Extra Art" pack in the demo project is a SelectAny mod*
3. ModType_SelectOne: Do you want your game to support user-made texture packs or an alternative map-generation algorithm? This mod variant is for you! One variant can be selected at a time, and any assets it contains will be used instead of the game's default assets. The "Tic-tac-toe texture packs" demonstrates this in the demo project.

*The demo project is not persistent (there is no saving and loading), so mod variants are never properly "unloaded." That is why all 3 pictures are always available in the "what is art" demo. I may fix this in the future. For now, please use your imagination...

What's the state of this project?

This project started as an element of my personal Godot asset library. I wanted a base game template to start my projects from, and I wanted mod-ability to be a foundational part of that template. Godot is great, but there is only one page of documentation on "packs, patches, and mods." I ended up building a lot of the functionality I needed for myself. I stumbled across the Tool Jam, and I decided to take the opportunity to make this into something fully-featured that others can use in their projects.

This project lives in a release branch of my personal library repository, but I would be happy to give it its own GitHub home and release it on the Godot asset store if there is any interest. It is already free and open source (MIT license), and will stay that way even if it moves.

I will be using this tool personally in my next game, so any obvious bugs or issues will be fixed as I find them. I also may add more features in the future, specifically mod dependencies, custom ordering in the mod list, and integrated saving and loading.