Plugins

A plugin bundles field declarations, dials, hooks and events into one thing you can switch off, edit, export, and install into another game.

Hunger, rest, stamina, mana, encumbrance and the NPC bonds are all plugins. None of them are engine code.

The bar

Deleting a plugin must leave a coherent game.

If your system cannot be switched off, it is engine code wearing a costume. That test is worth applying while you design, not after: it forces you to decide what happens to a game that never had your system, which is the same question as what happens when someone uninstalls it.

What a plugin declares

• Fields — values that live on entities. A meter with a max, tier prose and a HUD bar, or a plain number.
• Dials — your tuning numbers, with the defaults your plugin ships. $.dial('rate') reads your plugin's dial; values are namespaced by plugin, so two plugins may both declare baseRate and mean different numbers.
• Hooks — the behaviour.
• Events — what you offer other plugins a say in.
• Sections — a question your plugin adds to an engine LLM call, or prose it contributes.
• Seams — the one thing that replaces rather than adds.

Image: docs/plugins-step.png The Plugins step in /create, showing the installed plugin list with the shipped plugins (hunger, rest, stamina) and the editor panel for one of them open.

Building one

Open the Plugins step, create a plugin, and declare a field. That is enough to see it appear on a character sheet. Then add a hook that changes it.

The shipped plugins are ordinary plugins — open one in the code view and you have a complete, working example of everything on this page.

Sharing

Publish from the library with one click. Other authors find it under the Plugins step's Browse tab, and importing makes a copy — edit freely, with no fear of breaking someone else's game. Name collisions resolve automatically, because two people calling their plugin "Hunger" is ordinary.

Next

• Fields — declaring values with tiers and prose
• Cooperation — how plugins meet without depending on each other
• Formulas and dials — tuning numbers, and why never to freeze one
• Seams — replacing an engine calculation outright