LCBetterSaves

While working on their project, developers have to adhere to multiple constraints set by the genre, player count or art-style that their title fits into, without neglecting the balance between varying levels of difficulty and an engaging experience that makes players come back to enjoy the gameplay loop.

One way of bypassing said restrictions without compromising on the vanilla play-style is to provide the community with the necessary modding tools to create add-ons the likes of LCBetterSaves that ease the original developers’ workload while also changing some of the game mechanics in the process.

Thanks to the mod-friendly nature of the game’s Unity engine, third-party developers can make use of the BepInEx general purpose framework for modding designed to load custom code, patch in-game parameters and manage plugin dependencies in order to provide the community with tailor-made solutions.

Most of the modifications can end up drastically altering the gameplay loop in ways that impact the vanilla experience and tilt the scales in favor of the player in ways that the original developer cannot realistically anticipate, thus leading to mixed results, depending on the mod.

However, through the plugin at hand, the only core component that suffers changes is the saving system, which originally ships with only three slots. While the number should suffice for most players, the game’s support for various play-styles could use more saving opportunities.

Thus, LCBetterSaves brings in support for securing snapshots for each gameplay style that can range from careful planning and limited risk-taking to high-risk yet high-reward strategies, depending on how favorable the randomly-generated map seed’s structure is.

With LCBetterSaves, users can not only create and save their play-throughs more than three separate times, but also rename the saves in question to discern between the solo and co-op sessions.