I have a long and fruitful relationship with modding. Back in the day, I used to write Spigot plugins for Minecraft. Then I got poached to create marketplace content for Minecraft Bedrock Edition, which is how I supported myself though university.

Post University, I’ve dabbled in various games, but really found my home writing Lua mods for Sapiens. My largest contribution here is the Hammerstone Modding Framework, which has 10,000 installs.

Modding is enjoyable to me for a few reasons:

1. Building against an existing framework makes it easier for me to enjoy the content creation progress (I’m slow, so creating 1 mob is achievable, creating 200 is not).
2. “Breaking” games is fun. If you extend an existing game in a weird way, that’s more interesting than building a similar game mechanic in a general purpose game engine.
3. Easier to find an audience (riding coattails).

If you want to join me in my modding adventures, I have a discord for Sapiens and Minecraft.