What a mod looks like in progress
 

I find myself doing a number of the same things when testing changes to my mod, and I thought others might want to see my tricks, too.

game.ini

• I'm testing a quest for my new race, so the only races i have loaded are terran and the race being tested. Makes things easy for testing encounters with my race. I also added the garthans so I can see what happens when i lose my ally ship.

quests

• things being tested are flagged to ALWAYS
• gimmestuff - dumps items I want to test (tank) or are useful (hyperdrive and sensor) into my cargo hold at the begining of the game
• lostexpedition_fighter1join - creates an ally needed for my quest and labels the star on the map
• tankxplrvolc1 - makes a specific planet and labels it on the map
• lostexpedition_good - initializes some variables at the start and does a pop-up to let me know. I've been trying some things to get a variable ending on my quest and it was useful to have a popup to let me know when the variable was getting set/changed
• lostexpedition_encounter_all - displays the value of a variable at the end of encounter text - nice to check things as you move about the map, just in case it got set incorrectly. I also added some text in caps at the front so that I could tell instantly if it was this script firing off or another.

Of course all this gets cleaned up in the end, but it sure makes testing nice when things are so clear.