Eventually, we switched to Unity for corporate reasons

There's the Local Lua Debugger [0]. I don't know how it compares to decoda, but I experimented a bit with this debugger last weekend and it seems nice enough - well integrated into VS Code. --- [0]: https://github.com/tomblind/local-lua-debugger-vscode

I guess the main disadvantage with a custom engine vs Unity, is that you must train new people in it all, vs hiring experts in the tools. Your custom engine sounds interesting, though. I can recognize some thoughts ..

> But, we didn't have the budget for an editor. Instead we set up the asset pipeline to hot-reload everything. Meshes, scenes, materials and animations from Maya. I was the tools lead for "Superman Returns: The Videogame" (the PS2/X630 Superman game, no the N64 one). We did the same thing. All of Metropolis was essentially "modeled" in Maya with plug-ins handling importing and exporting between that and the in-game format. It was an open world streaming game and it would have killed an artist's machine to try to load the entire city into Maya, so the plug-in would let an artist pick which chunks of the city to load, load them in, let them make changes, and save the results back out. It worked out fairly well.

This is so cool and clever! Scott Bilas also documents doing something similar for Gabriel Knight 3, one of the “grandfathers” of data-driven engines and bit of an influence on ECS. Instead of excel however it was comma-separated text files that shipped with the game. During development could edit the files locally and reload the data without recompiling. Since we’re in a web heavy forum: An sql database and a web editor would also allow for a distributed workflow.

The usage of Excel is so hilariously cursed I can't stop thinking about it. Its just raw memory address look ups with extra steps. How did you merge the Excel file? Did you actually have source control on this? Ok maybe a sheet is fine for a state machine if you don't care about visualizing transitions... Why reference cells when you could have named functions in a source file that could actually parse the syntax? That file would be trivially merged. You want to be loose on types so I guess its fine but you could actually have type safety and linting all the other language features and tooling if you just used a file full of named globals. The mind boggles

Have you tried Luau - Roblox's open source compiled Lua with Types? Someone made a debugger for it that plugs into Visual Studio Code. https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/ https://github.com/sssooonnnggg/luau-debugger I'm working on an engine based in C++, Luau, and OpenGL - started almost 2 months ago. I aim for it to me MIT license open source, but it's too early for sharing. When it is, I do plan to post a show HN with the Github link.