The importance of scripting

Using Playground, the SDK from Playfirst. I have sought to make as much of the game content reliant on scripts as possible. With Playground's excellent LUA scripting feature, this has been made pretty easy since I do not have to bother with LUA binding issues and just concentrate on making as much of my game content reliant on LUA as possible. Plus, Playground has some pretty nifty functions to facilitate LUA debugging and development.

Right now, for the game. The character dialogues, background images and puzzles has been made so that all of them has been scripted in LUA. So changes can be made and checked in the game pretty fast without the need for compilation of source code. The plus side is that I can pass it to a non-programmer and get him to make changes to the dialogue, character information, background images and puzzles with ever needing to compile the source code.

The creation of a specific LUA framework to link our game specific content to LUA scripts have taken up a chunk of the timeline, but the effort spent will pay for itself down the road when there is a sizable saving in time and effort regarding generation of content for our game. The framework definitely has room for improvement down the road, but it should suffice for our current needs and I will continue to tweak and change it down the road as and when needed.

I recall reading in Game Developer magazine quite some time ago where a post mortem article said that the creation of tools will more than pay for itself in the later stage of development and I absolutely agree with that.