Plugins: where the manual controls live

In a lot of software, plugins are optional extras from third parties that you go shopping for. That is not the sense used here. A plugin is the panel of manual controls attached to a capability: the thing that lets you shape terrain rather than ask for terrain, or set the weather rather than describe the weather.

The reason they exist is the division of labour the whole product runs on. Director 1 writes code. It does not build your world, because placing things is a job for hands. Plugins are what hands need.

So every capability that has a spatial or aesthetic component ends up with controls. Ground, water, sky and weather, placement, character behaviour. You use them directly, in the builder, on a Mac or Windows desktop.

There are exactly two paths and they are both first-class. Either Director 1 does it, or you do it yourself on a plugin. There is no third path where you ask and the system quietly does something else.

That matters when the AI gets it wrong, which it will. You are not stuck waiting for a better result. You open the controls and move the thing.

It also matters for taste. Some decisions should never go through a description at all. Where the treeline stops, how heavy the fog is, whether that ridge is too steep to climb — those are judged by looking, and they are adjusted by hand while you look.

The engine is Godot, which is open source, and your project is a real Godot project on your own disk rather than a proprietary file. That is the substrate everything sits on.

It also means the plugin format is not an invention of ours. Godot has its own long-standing ecosystem of addons written in GDScript, and a Godot project is a Godot project regardless of which app you opened it with. Anything Stage Engine does to your project is done in that format.

The practical consequence is that the work survives us. If you stopped using Stage Engine, the project still opens in Godot, which is free to download.

There is no marketplace, no paid add-on tier, and no capability held behind a plan. Free, Indie at $10 a month and Pro at $50 all run the same builder with the same controls. Paid plans buy more AI usage and nothing else.

There is also no fixed catalogue of "supported game types" implemented as plugins, because a fixed catalogue is a ceiling with marketing on it. Controls exist for things that are continuous and spatial, and everything else is code, written to your description.

The rule we work to is that a control should stand for something continuous rather than something chosen from a list. A slider for how steep a slope can be is a control. A dropdown of five terrain types is a list pretending to be one, and it will be wrong for the sixth person who uses it.

That is why you will not find genre presets, biome menus or style packs. Each of those would work beautifully for the games we have already imagined and fail for the one you turn up with.

It also means controls get added when there is something real underneath them to control. A panel with nothing behind it is worse than no panel, because it implies a capability that does not exist. When a control appears, it is because the thing it adjusts is genuinely adjustable.