Game designers really like Excel —for good reason. I’ve set up the tech for many games over the decades where we had designers write tiny snippets of code in t

Game designers really like Excel —for good reason. I’ve set up the tech for many games over the decades where we had designers write tiny snippets of code in the cells of Excel spreadsheets. First in a custom assembly-like language (for an N64 game) then in SmallC, actual C++ and mostly in Lua. The general theme was to use the grids to define state machines. Rows are states. Columns represent events. Cells define what to do at the intersection of an event in a certain state. Later games also used Lua code cells as active spreadsheets in the game. The Lua statements would calculate results when queried. The charts didn’t just know about raw numbers and strings. They also could load and manipulate assets in the game. So, a designer could describe which UI asset to put next to the health bar based on the player’s current health stat without bothering a programmer or artist. In the last case, we shipped two very different 3D mobile games using the same executable but different assets. Live hot-reloading of the Lua charts, the UI XML and all the other assets meant that we didn’t even need to bother making an editor for our custom engine. A good text editor window next to the game window was productive enough.