Two weeks ago, several of my friends and I – who play a cooperative videogame together – were a little frustrated with some changes made with no warning by the developers. We didn’t understand why they made them (they never communicated a clear goal or process or … anything, really) and we certainly didn’t like many of them invalidating previously useful pieces of equipment and strategies and so on, without giving us new, similarly effective stuff. It was, more or less, a global nerf. To a free product, that’s one thing, but to a product people paid money for? And to a product with many, many DLC items people paid more money for? A no-warning, no-explanation global balance change was awful.
On the other hand, the developers helpfully left the entire code to change everything in unencrypted lua, and the clients trust the local lua … so if we modified the values and all ran with the same code, we’d all experience the same balance. Security? What’s that? But convenient for our purposes.
After reading a lot of community complaints about the changes, I thought “…I can do this. I can make this.” So I took it upon myself to redo the balance values, distribute a lua override file to my friends, and for us, at least, we’re playing the game we want to play. It wasn’t until I was having what amounted to an impromptu standup over VOIP that I realized …we’re basically doing agile videogame modding. Continue reading Agile in the unlikeliest of places