Hello Keepers,
it's been a while since "A Keeper's Duty" hit, and as we lined out before, our current development focus is on multiplayer. It is progressing well, but we know it needs a lot of time. Refactoring a game from singleplayer to multiplayer is generally not recommended because it is a vast undertaking. Usually you plan and code for multiplayer from the start, or omit it completely. We'll do it anyway!Since this will take time, we've been thinking a lot about if and how we can still do something interesting. The glorious answer is MODDING.
We want to push this a bit and help as much as we can to enable people to make cool mods. Mods are amazing because they can offer things that are outside of the design of "core Dome Keeper". They can do totally new things or expand what is there, be silly, hardcore challenging or simply fun.
Renewed shall be modding that was broken
This year we ported Dome Keeper from Godot 3 to Godot 4. Godot is the engine we use. This was a big undertaking done for three reasons, being multiplayer, console ports and future proofing the project. With that switch, the way the game can be modded did change too, and thus most mods broke.
We hired Ste from our community to lead the effort of making modding work for Godot 4 for Dome keeper. He is a cornerstone of our community and a key person in the Godot modloader project (shoutout to Kana too <3), so in short the perfect fit to champion modding.
The result: modding is back, yay!
Leading the pack
Already we have some great mods, some new and some ported. We made a cool trailer to showcase some of them - take a look at it below!
The stars of that show are of course the cool people making the mods. By the way, join our Discord if you want to make mods or know more about it. Everyone is helpful there and as devs we are happy to support where we can.
https://youtu.be/iJCV2MjXJYc
Mod Jam
Dome Keeper originated in a 3 day game jam, Ludum Dare 48. What could be more fitting than making a jam for creating cool mods for Dome Keeper?!
With that in mind we are so excited to announce that we'll be doing an official Dome Keeper Mod Jam in January. The idea of this is to dedicate a few days to making new Dome Keeper mods, expand existing mods or simply port old mods. As devs we'll focus our attention during the event to support the modders - advice, solutions, patches and possibly even coding or art support.
Praise is good and all, but we'll also have some prizes for anyone that would like to submit their mod to be reviewed by the team. We'll be giving out awards too! We'll share more details about the mod jam soon, including dates and prizes, so please stay tuned (did i mention joining the discord?)
Mod Support
One final thing to mention is that we have a new Dome Keeper Let's Play dropping on the Raw Fury YouTube channel here later today at 17:30CET. This one will be all about how to install and make the most of mods, along with showing some of the recent ones added to Dome Keeper. So if you've never tried using mods in Dome Keeper before but have always wanted to, then please check it out!
That's it for now!
