depot

depot is a standalone json data editor that acts as a data workbench for you games or other projects. it's a json-backed database that acts like a spreadsheet, giving you tons of flexibility and control in how you design the data for your game.

what is depot good for?

• you've got a digital card game with lots of abilities and skills and icons that you want to have associated with cards
• you've got a roguelike and want to have a place to assign skills and properties to enemies
• you've got a lot of text to localize and you want a single source of truth to track both the string ids and the translations, and also feed that data into other parts of your game
• you're making a traditional roguelike and want to edit unit attack patterns and give them abilities and items
• you're making a strategy game and your units have a lot of stats and abilities that you want to more easily track and sort through.
• you're making a vampire surviors-like and want a place to define your enemies and waves and items in one single location
• you're making a tower defence and want a place to describe tower behavior
• maybe you're even making a physical board game, or a totally seperate application that isn't even game related at all, and just want an easy to use database tool to feed data into whatever your thing is.

depot can do all that, and more. it gives you a place to author and edit all that data independent of any editor, and gives you the tools to easily import that data into your actual game. this means that, with a tool like depot, you can hot-load data in a build of the game, without needing to actually re-import the data again in engine. no scriptableobjects, just data! this also means you can ship content updates to your game without needing to rebuild!

leaning into data in this way also makes modding way more possible — because you're game is just this data, you can easily expose it to users to change and edit that data in the same tool you use to author it in the first place.

this project is a work in progress and not released yet — follow for updates as they come

used in conjunction with the C# source generator, you can easily use Depot to generate typesafe versions of your data for easy use in your game engine of choice without any need to declare that data in the engine itself.

some background:

this is a total overhaul/refresh of my previously released open source, VS Code-based data editing tool Depot.

you can find the source for the old Depot here, anddownload it for visual studio code here. 

this new version is a standalone piece of software built with electrobun, but also works in a web browser for hosted scenarios. it is a ground-up rewrite, and with it adds a ton of requested features from old Depot as well as lots of new things, inspired by my own extensive use of it to release my game Cantata.

some highlights:

• local-first design w/ websockets for easy editing and syncing
• REST api for data access/editing from external tools
• sheet filtering/sorting/grouping
• formula fields
• custom exports
• rearrangeable/resizeable columns
• custom column data views
• "rollup" views for quick analysis
• evaluator for quick data tasks/queries
• dedicated validation "rules"

and more!

depot will have some free tier for light/basic use, and a subscription tier that gives you everything as well as the option for us to host your data so you can easily work on your data from anywhere.