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Penlight

A visual novel where you hypnotize cute girls and feel bad about it (in development) · By Angela DeMille

What is your stance on mods?

A topic by ariadrakeblood created Nov 26, 2019 Views: 1,320 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 3

I only discovered Penlight a few weeks ago, but I've been hooked by the characters and storytelling!

While waiting for the next update, I've begun occupying myself by writing my own scenes into my local copy of the game, and it occurred to me that I'm basically building a mod (although admittedly not a very cohesive or polished one). Next thing I know I'm considering how little it costs me to share this mod with other fans of Penlight. 

The thing that made me hesitate is: it looks like any version of the mod I publish is going to contain in it a fully-functional copy of the original game (or at least the version I started from). I don't want to create a second source of the base game, and steal attention/credit from the original (especially because of itch.io asking for donations when you download a copy).

I just wanted to check if you were ok with people publishing (not for money! Just sharing the products of my labors with the community) modded versions of the game, and if so what would you consider to be 'best practices' for pointing people back towards the original?

Developer

Wow, I'm quite flattered that people are into Penlight enough that they're basically writing fanfic about it ^.^ But ehh, yeah you've already identified the problem with this: You don't have a way to distribute it as a mod without also packaging the rest of the game with it, and I'm a bit iffy about that for the same reasons you cite. If there were a way to distribute just the modified script as some kind of fan-made patch, that'd be one thing, but yeah, I'm not comfortable sanctioning a derivative version of my game. Even done with good intentions it's going to muddy the waters a bit.

So, not against modding in principle, but unless there's a way of doing this without redistributing the entire game I'd ask that you refrain from doing that.

Ok, that's largely what I expected. I'll keep my 'fanfics' to myself, then.

Thanks for the rapid response!

(+2)

Sorry to necro this thread but look into diffing/patching tools such as this one. There are several formats the most common contains a bit of context sorounding the changes (it is still a derivative) but it won’t redistribute any unchanged original assets and not enough information to reproduce the original unless like almost every line is modified. See Wikipedia for more details. Adding a new menu option for a new path should hardly contain much of the original conversation. This tool can also patch folders and stuff so it would be suited for IMHO.

Would the developer feel comfortable with this?

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