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Designing the #Lua #scripting APIs for Sovereign Engine is one of my most challenging tasks yet. How do you anticipate future needs and design something that is both developer-friendly and future-proof? I'm going with a dogfooding approach. A thread...

Sovereign is an open source 2.5D #MMORPG #engine, in a similar vein as Mirage and Intersect. The idea is for a hobbyist or indie dev to be able to pick it up and immediately start building something. That means we need a scripting engine so that you don't need to dive into the core of the engine.

A common pitfall with easy-to-use #scripting engines is that they aren't flexible enough to do everything you want, or the APIs were designed with the wrong #abstractions that makes it cumbersome to do anything but simple toy examples. This is something you have to overcome early in the design.

That's where #dogfooding comes in. It works for #startups, it can work for #opensource game engines too (I claim with no proof... yet). The idea is to use the tools you are building for real development early and often, creating an internal feedback loop for continuously improving the APIs. Simple?

Not so simple when you consider the usual instinct to keep doing what you're already doing. In the case of Sovereign Engine, that means developing every single feature in C# and leaving scripting to the users. And that's what I was going to do until I stopped to think about it. Bad idea!

So here's my new plan, and let's see how this goes: I'm going to build a scripting API early and start delivering real features as scripts instead of deeply buried engine code. We will start small: displaying a message to a player when they first log in. But we will build up from there - what else?