Dink Smallwood - Modification

Modification

Two level editors exist for Dink Smallwood. The original level editor, developed by Robinson Technologies, is DinkEdit, which is included with the game, and the second level editor is WinDinkEdit which was developed by fans of the game. The freeware game comes with its own D-Mod (short for Dink Module), Mystery Island, which follows Dink's adventures after his victory in the original story. D-Mods can be heavily customized, and some of them are very different from the original game. Many good D-Mods, some of them much longer than the original game, can be found online.

DinkEdit is a modal application that can be used to create a new world. The game world consists of at most 768 screens and each screen can have at most a hundred editor-placed sprites. Among other tasks, the editor can be used to specify music for a screen, assign scripts to sprites and to decorate the game world. WinDinkEdit is a level editor for Windows which enables the D-Mod author to perform the same tasks in a graphical environment.

The DinkC scripting language has a C-like syntax. Variables are prefixed with an ampersand, &, and single line comments are supported with //. Each sprite in the game can have a script attached to it which will be used to determine the behaviour and appearance of the sprite. The engine calls various functions on certain events; for example, the 'main', 'talk' and 'hit' functions of a script will respectively be called upon loading the screen, when the player talks to the sprite and when the player hits the sprite. Each screen can also have a script attached to it which can be used for initialization of the screen or other events.