tight_pair VS sol2

There's also this doomed project with lots of metaprogramming and weird tricks where it took me more than 1500 lines of code to implement a slightly optimized compressed pair: https://github.com/Morwenn/tight_pair

As someone said, make the game data-driven is a good first step but I will say, also have some sort of way to add additional game logic. For C++ games, lua is really easy to embed the interpreter in your C++ binary, read in the files from a directory (like /mods) with the C++ filesystem api new in C++17, and it's very easy to use SoL to write an API for lua specific to your game. Many games use lua in this way and it's probably the most common mod path setup.

I've only ever done this from C++, but it's using the same lua C library, so should be durable from C as well. You can look up how sol2 or any other wrapper libraries do it.

Consider sol2

This version relies on a Lua C++ wrapper called sol2 to hide Lua stack management from the developer, so creating new bindings can be done by adding a few lines of human-readable C++. It still has to be done manually, but at least sol2 is able to automatically figure out types of objects being bound, so it's not much different from our de-/serialization code.

Here's an example: sol2

Here is link number 2 - Previous text "Sol"

Have you considered using sol2? https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 Or if you don't want to switch over, you can at least look at their code and see how they handle this.

It is half of a pun as I was inspired by [sol3](https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2) which is a lua <-> c++ wrapper. Sol means sun and the julia c-api prefixes all it's functions with jl, luna means moon so it is pronounced "jay luna"

If you want to be portable I'd recommend C++ and Lua, I used those for years and it runs on everything and there's this most amazing wrapper API which was a huge inspiration