With this you can make sure that the scripts in your game are always reading from the most up-to-date version of balancing, while allowing your designers to do their work in more industry standard tools like Excel and Google Sheets.

It should be able to be installed with Aftman and Foreman, otherwise it is downloadable as an exe under releases for manual addition to your path environment.

This tool takes a csv / xlsx / google sheet and converts it into a strictly typed roblox modulescript.

This is an example CSV file:

a, b, c
1, 2, 3
4, 5, 6
7, 8, 9

This is the type of script the tool generates:

--!strict
export type EntryData = {
  a: number,
  b: number,
  c: number
}

return {
  {
    a = 1,
    b = 2,
    c = 3,
  },
  {
    a = 4,
    b = 5,
    c = 6,
  },
  {
    a = 7,
    b = 8,
    c = 9
  }
} :: {[number]: EntryData}

The first argument should be the path to the source file (when one is needed), the output path is then provided following the -o marker.

spreadsheet-to-luau path/to/file.csv -o path/to/luau/script.luau

spreadsheet-to-luau path/to/file.xlsx -o path/to/luau/script.luau

You don't need to end your path with .luau, this does work with lua, however since luau is technically a new language with patterns that could break standard lua interpreters, it's better in most cases to use the proper extension.

In the modern age of the internet, living document services like Google Sheet can be useful for collaborative projects. You can take a snapshot of them using this tool.

On the google sheet page open the publish menu by going to File -> Share -> Publish to Web. In the "Link" tab, configure it to publish with the configuration of "Entire Document" and "Web Page". The press publish and you should be good.

From the URL of the sheets page the sheet and page ids are stored at these points:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/SHEET_ID/edit#gid=PAGE_ID

Running this will download and write the main page as a balancing file.

spreadsheet-to-luau -sheet SHEET_ID -o path/to/luau/script.luau

If you want to download a page other than the main one, you can specify it like so:

spreadsheet-to-luau -sheet SHEET_ID -page PAGE_ID -o path/to/luau/script.luau

You can further specify the way the module-script beyond supplying the source and output path.

Include the tag -nospace to remove spaces from the column names.

spreadsheet-to-luau -sheet SHEET_ID -o path/to/luau/script.luau -nospace

If the columns have a unique value that can be used as a key in the final luau table, you can specify it following the -id marker.

spreadsheet-to-luau -sheet SHEET_ID -o path/to/luau/script.luau -id Name

If you don't include this tag it will simply write the final luau table in list format in the order which they were arranged in the source.

If you have a ton of entries you want to import across multiple modules, you can organize them with the -sub marker.

spreadsheet-to-luau -sheet SHEET_ID -o Test.luau -sub Class -sub Species

The above example will write it as a series of directory organized scripts like so:

| Test
	| Heavy
		| Alien.luau
		| Human.luau
		| Zombie.luau
	| Sniper
		| Alien.luau
		| Human.luau
		| Zombie.luau	
	| Pyro
		| Alien.luau
		| Human.luau
		| Zombie.luau

All scripts were generated to support type safety principals, which includes generating an exportable custom luau datatype. You can set the name of that datatype with -type.

spreadsheet-to-luau -sheet SHEET_ID -o path/to/luau/script.luau -type TypeNameHere

The default type name is "EntryData".

Spreadsheets are the best way to do lightweight designing of systems with numerous unique entities containing the same properties. Game development can benefit much from them, by automating the conversion of spreadsheets to balancing data you cutout the risk of manual translation mistakes, as well as decrease the amount of time needed to replicate changes.

If you want to try to add features yourself go for it, this is written in Python because Rust gives me too much of a headache and I don't need this to run in a single millisecond. It's compiled with PyInstaller as an .exe.

I'll probably add more command like tags and markers, as well as support for other spreadsheet sources / output formats if there's enough demand for that.

Feel free to sponsor my github page to show support / say thanks if this helped you out.