First thing first: Hi everyone, I haven’t been a londoner for too much, in fact I never played Fallen London and just discover this masterpiece the last week when a shared friend’s library on steam bought it but since then I’ve only been out of the game when the owner kicked me out to play himself. I’m on vacations and I’ve been sunless myself for four days 'cause of you, bastards xD. I was a heavy roleplayer when I was young and this game is just amazing in so much ways for me that I will surely own a copy soon enough. Let’s go the crux of what took me here.
I’ve heard you are looking for feedback on how we would want to mod the game and the greedy answer is obviously "in every possible way" but being realistic I’ve dissected what I think would be good for us all to control in a crude and almost unsorted list. I might develop my points further if people are interested on it but for now here it is.
-> Entities: There should be a way to make our owned objects (javatalking here) so we can make characters NPCs and officers, items, curiosities, and journal entries and accomplishments, and I did forgot: stores. Of course there should be a way to put images to it all.
-> Buffs, debuffs, and other interactions: While holding or owning those entities modding should allow at least to a minimum interaction with existent quests and other interactions, for example, "Glob, the Unformed" could be a sentient wildcard who you could assign as part of the ship or as first officer, gunner or cook and assign a buff/debuff/interaction set according on where he is. That would be the harder approach to entities possibilities but also the one which would do them more complex and interesting.
-> Storylets: This doesn’t need much of a explanation and you obviously already have it in your schedule but to make it clear user made storylets should be as customizable as possible making them able to give you (and require, since that’s how they work) or modify the above described entities and their interactions. No much more to say here.
All that is something you for sure have already on your schedule if you are finally going to make the game moddable being the only interesting addition the multiple uses objetct… So let’s start with what would be harder to do but also enriching of the modding experience:
-> Gazzeetter mods: I think it’s mandatory to add self made tabs, or even better, modify existing ones so someone can do their own job arranging them and adding features to the game. The first thing it comes to my mind is to make my own "Shipyard" tab where I can buy a dock in which I can store an embarkation or more and buy new ships instead of trading the actual one. Also, I would like to add a fee for doing so.
-> Legacy system: It would be great to make it possible to pass to the next captain customizable things. Some ideas which come to my mind is to make it possible to do different wills: "The heir take a certain deformation, granted by a demon patron of his father", for example. It wouldn’t be much hard to just workaround this or that without changing the actual legacy system but some other more deep modifications would need a well integrated and customizable legacy thing, for example choosing your heir if you have more than one (which, with modded storylets, could be an amazing possibilitie for an old sailor).
And, pop-ups aside, the even harder and even enriching and possibly beautiful of all this:
-> Custom ports: There are a lot of beaches, ports and islands that haven’t got any real use besides being beautiful so it would be great if we could add one of those light-circles to embark on them and let the fun beggin.
-> Custom enemies: stats, assets and animations of all kind of zee beasts, wouldn’t it be great?
-> Custom IA behaviour: the last thing for obvious reasons is this. I don’t know how you code and call it to make enemies move and attack but the more complex you make this the better.
Finally, I’ve forgot to add that every stat in the game should be easily moddable but I find it hard that you haven’t already realize it.
Those are my thoughts on the modding of Sunless Sea and would want to hear what the rest of you think of it. Thanks for reading, I hope it didn’t take too much effort and sorry if there are typos or heavy grammatical failures, I can’t write/speak english properly yet.
edited by Akhram on 2/26/2015