Cover image/banner courtesy of Conne
Hello again, friends! It's been months since we first teased it on Twitter...so who's ready to talk about modding and Project Nexus? We sure as heck are. And we'll be sprinkling in some previews of our early Beta testers' WIP projects along the way.
Courtesy of Lurk
Let's cut right to the big question first: when will this release? Right now, we're aiming to get the beta modding tools out to the public by this Friday, May 24th. And just like all of our updates, this one's completely free.
Courtesy of DarkSignal
The next question is what will I be able to mod? Firstly, a disclaimer: Not everything in M:PN can be modded, and some features slated for the future won't be available during this beta launch. Currently you'll be able to create custom weapons and addons, outfit pieces, character body parts, gibs and guts, and animations. Custom audio is also a thing, as is reskinning and remodeling existing assets. You can alter the details of Arena and Story stages (who's in the mission, what kinds of waves and
rewards you'll face, and so on), but fully custom stages aren't out of development yet.
Courtesy of Gangrene
How does one mod their copy of MADNESS: Project Nexus? Using Unity's built-in ScriptableObject and AssetBundle systems, the game reads simple text documents written in the JSON format to create and alter the values of game assets, such as the color of a character's blood and the weapons they prefer in combat, or stats and values like the rate of fire and SFX of a weapon. Nearly all values the game uses can be altered. This also includes game visuals: new textures, models, and effects can be imported to replace vanilla assets, or to represent brand new objects.
Courtesy of Zepumpkineater
New 3D and 2D assets can be created using your preferred program, but integrating them will require a little knowledge of the Unity 2019 Editor. We'll be giving the community access to DarkSignal's MadCard Maker app if they'd prefer to skip learning JSON and want to jump directly into altering the game, and a ModTools Project for Unity with everything you need to start creating new visuals for the game.
Courtesy of cl4ssic
And finally, how do I add mods to my game? Your subscribed mods from Steam Workshop will appear right there in your game when logged in (you'll still have to enable them at the M:PN title screen). The folder with all of your M:PN careers will also have a new Mods folder, where mods you're testing or have downloaded yourself can be dropped and played without ever involving Steam.
Courtesy of DarkSignal and Lurk
So what's on the horizon for modding, then? How far will all these tools let modders go toward customizing the game? Let's talk about the scope, with the caveat that we may limit or remove items from this list in the future, and we may also add more features to the list depending on viability and player demand.
- Custom Stages This is going to be the biggest request, no doubt about it. It's a very big undertaking, and goes beyond simply altering game values and importing custom content. M:PN wasn't originally built to be modded, so adjusting it after release has forced us to take our sweet, sweet time...and that was just to let players customize game assets. Now we're talking fully custom scenes filled with the thousands upon thousands of individually placed assets that make up a stage, so don't expect this one to roll out quickly.
- Event System Even if brand new community-built stages never happen (and we really think that they will!), M:PN was built around an Event System that listens for the completion of user-dictated conditions that then produce user-dictated results. It's a pretty reliable system that handles most of the nuances of Story and Arena stages where things happen beyond "enemies spawn, room unlocks when they're dead". When Jorge goes down and Church calls in reinforcements, that's the Event System listening for a condition (a character with a specific serial number just died) and initiating its own action in response (enable Church's dialog calling for help, and then spawn a wave of MERC soldiers). This system will give modders the ability to fully adjust the things that happen in the game, creating a nearly custom experience.
- Cutscenes Kind of an offshoot of the previous two points, the ability to alter the cutscenes in existing stages would be a nice, temporary compromise to the lack of customizing stages. Altering cutscenes would let casual modders tweak vanilla stages and alter the participants and dialog of any cutscene, letting them tell their own story. When we see custom stages finally rolling out, modded Cutscenes are how you'll put that last little custom spin on your mod.
- Script Plugins We have one very dedicated modder by the name of Twingamerdudes currently trailblazing a Lua plugin for PN. This, as well as any other potential script plugins, would allow for functions far beyond the capabilities of the base game via execution of custom scripting. Things like custom abilities for characters and weapons, gamemodes, new UI tools and functionality, quality of life features, and more would become possible. It has quite the potential for busting this game wide open, but will need to be developed and explored quite extensively.
And that's where we are now! Thanks for being patient with us ever since we very casually hinted that we'd be opening up the game to the Workshop. You know how the old adage goes, and since we've gone for good and cheap (free), this wasn't gonna be done fast. And hopefully before Friday we'll have some decent tutorial documentation up for you to get a head start.