gambit37 wrote:When I said a Dungeon Editor needs to be accessible and easy to use, I meant just that: the
Dungeon Editor. I'm not talking about all the modding abilities that come through writing custom code.
If you want hobbyist designers to be able to
create dungeons (not mods), you need a visual Dungeon Editor that is capable of constructing all the game's basic mechanics: the map layout, doors, switches, alcoves, monsters, pads, torches, items, etc. I linked to
DSB earlier, this works exactly the same way. The editor has a GUI for building all the basics, and you don't need to write any code. But if you want to add new assets or do some custom puzzles or whatever, that's when you need to write code. It is the best of both worlds for all levels of designer/coder, and hundreds of other games have editors that work the same way.
You can't expect hobbyist designers to root around in code to build a basic dungeon. It would frankly be nuts to code a dungeon by hand. Yes, I appreciate the LoG team did that, but they didn't have the time or resources to build an editor, so it was the most cost effective solution for them at the time. That doesn't mean it should be the approach for a future editing tool though. Even if the editor pumps out a bit of Lua for activating a door or whatever, this is much better than making the user have to write that code.
Without a visual editor, it will limit who can make dungeons, and therefore it will make the modding scene for LoG so exclusive as to be unattractive to most hobbyists.
Generally speaking, designers have a visual mindset and work best with visual tools, they aren't so good at coding. It's the whole left brain/right brain thing. Programmers who say programming is easy for anyone simply don't appreciate that different people think in different ways: what's easy for some, is devilishly hard for others.
If you force designers to have to code, you are massively restricting their creative output. And that's the death knell for your modding community.
