.scd

The .scd Data File

This page will eventually become documentation for the .scd files, but for now, let's talk about what a .scd file is. A .scd file is always human-readable text, describing parameters of an object. An object's instantiation code opens its .scd file and loads in user-settable parameters like a character's start position, the font she will speak with, and her nominal display size in pixels.

This is beneficial because it makes characters, rooms, GUIs, fonts, everything, portable from game to game and from user to user. With some judicious copying and a few edits to text files, it would be possible to take two entirely different games and build a mashup of the two, possibly even if they're at different resolutions (although your main.py file would have to do some shimmying whenever someone walked over the border between the two games).

Which brings me to a central idea behind ScummPy: I want to maximize the chances that players will open, edit, remix, and re-share games they make and play with it.