After 350+ hours of work, I now have a version of VRogue that I'm proud to release to the world! Not just here on steam, but also on GitLab.

That's right, I've decided to reach the goal of making the game moddable in the greatest possible way: Just giving everyone the source code!

What's this mean for the steam release?

Nothing! The repository is the exact code that's in the final product; the only difference is that I've got a few flags enabled for the Steam version (one that encrypts the savegame, and another that changes the leaderboard name). Any changes I make whether my own or patches from others will be merged into the repo first and periodically pushed up here to steam.

Isn't it free now? Why pay?

Yes, it's completely free! Only purchase if you feel inclined to support my development of this or future games. Or if you just don't feel like building it yourself! Since $10 is a bit much for a compilation fee, I'll be dropping the price to $5 shortly after this announcement.

What happened to mods?

My previous announcement said that the main thing I wanted to get done for this release was mod support, and I got fairly involved in doing so. Most of the support for mods was in the form of Godot Resource Packs. Now, the more security minded among you are probably wondering what I was thinking with that, what with how that has some security issues. The answer is that Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, and many other popular games also do mods in such a way that a bad actor could compromise their machine, and it largely hasn't been an issue.

... until recently, that is. The biggest demonstration of the kind of thing I'm talking about is the GodLoader vulnerability, and the `.pck` files mentioned are exactly the kind of files I'd be using for doing modding, and which mod creators would be passing around.

So, my options from there were to make an entirely sandboxed scripting environment (likely in an entirely different language like lua) which would almost be the equivalent of rewriting the whole thing, or... this! To me, there's no greater way to mod a game than having the full source code available. Making a new texture pack won't require you to guess how things are laid out or depend on potentially out of date documentation, now you can just open up the project and go!

Enjoy!