Abandoned Morrowind WIPs up for grabs

As promised, I’ve uploaded a couple of abandoned WIPs that you are welcome to finish up and release if you are so minded:

Better Tribunal Main Quest
http://www.4shared.c…UNFINISHED.html

This was plugging some of the minor holes in the TB MQ – adding extra and alternative dialogue in key scenes. I think it was mostly done, from memory, but I’ve added in some notes as a text file for another modder to pick this up.

Mages Guild Apartments
http://www.4shared.c…ts_UNFINIS.html

I thought it might be nice if there was a comfortable room for the player in each of the mages guilds. I didn’t get too far in this one – as far as I recall, I did Balmora, Ald’ruhn, Caldera and part of the Wolverine Hall guild.

[Note: if you have any problems downloading the files, try logging into 4shared]

Abandoned Fallout 3 WIPs uploaded as modder’s resources

Since it’s pretty clear to me now that I’ll never finish them (with a young baby and all that – I only have time to mod one game, and that’s Skyrim), I’ve uploaded my half-finished WIPs in the hope that another modder will take them over, finish and release them.

Underworld Underground 2.0
http://www.4shared.c…nd_2pt0_UN.html

This is an update to my previously released Underworld Underground mod. In this unfinished version, I’ve added a cavern market area, a tavern and a bathhouse. There was going to be more housing and the usual stuff you’d expect to find in an expansion.

Canterbury Expanded
http://www.4shared.c…UNFINISHED.html

This turned the boarded up buildings of Canterbury Commons into inhabited premises and improved the existing enterable buildings. The idea was to turn it into a pleasant, functioning town rather than a fortified bunkhouse. My progress notes are here. I did actually make significant progress in this mod, though there’s still plenty to do.

Rivet City Expansion
http://www.4shared.c…_UNFINISHE.html

This is what it says – an expansion to Rivet City. I made a big hydroponic farm thingy, gardens to explore, and started work on the actual inhabitable area which was going to include a cinema, shops, a school and player/NPC housing. Here’s a few screenshots of the garden/farm area

The Scrapcave
http://www.4shared.c…NISHED_WIP.html

This was a grand idea I had to create a castle out of scrap metal, with a huge Batman-style cave lair underneath it that would have lots of gadgets for the hero of the Wastes. I only seem to have two screenshots – those of the exterior – but I’d mostly finished the interior. There was just the cave-lair to build and a few bits to tidy up, as far as I recall.

[Note: if you have problems downloading, try logging into 4shared]

In Progress: Sercen Manor – Ayleid Tree Village

It’s almost exactly three years since I mentioned that I was making a sequel to my Silorn Manor mod for Oblivion. I’ve started making it about three times, too. Yes, I have almost as many WIPs as I have completed mods, but I normally do get around to them  eventually.

After reinstalling the game again and yet again losing any progress, I suddenly knew how to make the mod work. You can blame Korana for this, because I got the modding itch while poking round her excellent Millstone Farm mod. I got the idea for this one from my Oasis house mod for Fallout 3 – the way to make the player feel like they are high up in a tree, whilst still allowing a stable, functional village base. I also knew where to set it, after falling in love with the Sercen ruin during regular Oblivion gameplay.

In Progress: Jacobstown Expanded

Yeah, I know: why start a new one when you have so many left to complete? Well, this is small and simple – just four new interiors – and I did it in a day!

Just got to check it all works!

Screenshots from the editor, since I haven’t had a chance to check it out in-game yet.

In Progress: A Trivial Mistake

I found out something today that means I’m going to have to swap out two cells in Canterbury Commons.

.

“The barbers of former times were also surgeons and dentists. In addition to haircutting, hairdressing, and shaving, barbers performed surgery, bloodletting and leeching, fire cupping, enemas, and the extraction of teeth. Thus they were called barber surgeons, and they formed their first organization in 1094.^[1] The barber pole red and white in spiral indicated the two crafts, surgery in red and barbering in white.” – Wikipedia

I had assumed the red-and-white striped pole outside what I had labelled a general store was some reference to candy. Now I’m noticing those poles everywhere! And, yes, always outside a gentlemen’s hairdresser. I’ll now swap over the barber shop and general store locations so that they can inhabit the correct buildings.

Just a small example of how the best laid modding plans can be unsettled by real life …

Work in Progress: The ScrapCave

A work in progress for Fallout 3.

I had a great idea watching The Dark Knight.

See, I’ve had a very unsatisfying time modding lately. Nothing seems to inspire me, though I can clearly see all my finished WIPs in my mind’s eye. I finished a house I’d been making in Anchorage (another one!) and decided immediately that I didn’t like it and deleted it right away. (Yes, I backed it up in case I suddenly change my mind later.) Working on anything else feels like a chore right now.

So I decided to build myself a castle. Out of scrap.

Last Resort: Remaking Point Lookout

Canterbury Commons is of course not forgotten – I’ve merely shelved it for a short while as I think around a literal brick wall I’ve run into with one of my ideas for the mod. In the meantime, I’m distracted by wherever this week’s bout of inspiration is coming from, which at the moment is Point Lookout.

Point Lookout, MD

A Modder’s Perspective: ‘A Theory of Fun for Game Design’ by Raph Koster

Games are fundamentally important to society. You and I might know this but a lot of people dismiss them as frivolous, childish pursuits that people are supposed to grow out of. Even people who enjoy them might undervalue them – or just not really understand why fun and games aren’t just important for psychological wellbeing but vital to human development as a whole. As game theory develops, says Koster in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, the central component of “fun” is being lost – and with it, the very essence of what games by their nature are trying to achieve.

Games are Education. Raph Koster – the former Sony Online executive who previously developed Ultima Online – says that games aren’t a medium at all, but just a broad facet of a defined pedagogical structure. The medium – which doesn’t seem to have a name – includes fire drills and tabletop disaster recovery exercises. Play, whether it’s playing cops and robbers in the back garden as children or deciding which team-mate to save in Mass Effect, is our brain’s essential What If impulse. We put ourselves instinctively through simulations from infancy onwards because each game has a lesson to teach us and it is through this that we learn and develop. The lesson might not be obvious: GTA IV is not teaching us how to murder criminals, but rather how to judge time and space in the driving. The lesson is the same as the Snake game you get on old mobile phones.

Koster suggests that through this system of practicing and learning, we use and even rewire our brains to help us to solve problems, and our brain rewards us for our efforts with endorphins when we succeed. This is why we enjoy playing games, and the essential driver of that enjoyment is of keeping the problems challenging and exciting but recogniseable enough for us to think we can succeed. Our brains make us seek the quickest, simplest solution – even if that’s “cheating” – and will tell us to give up if we predict failure in our next attempt. The role of the designer is to keep the challenges unpredictable so that the player thinks that they might succeed. A guaranteed outcome is boring, whether that’s to win or lose.

So how does that apply to mods?

In Progress: Visiting Canterbury

One of the main challenges with modding is remembering to serve the game, as opposed to simply using it as a platform for my own ego. Of course, there’s a place for just making random things for the hell of it, and room for many wild flights of fancy, but the mods I like best revolve around plugging any perceived needs in the game rather than just adding stuff for the sake of it.

Whether or not you inwardly cringe (and many do) at the choice of furniture in Mournhold Expanded or the Dagoth Ur casino in Ghostgate, both were the result of my need to see a sprawling “city of magic”, and “what happened next”, respectively. Neither were produced because I thought it would be a really cool idea to add x, but because I assumed that with infinite time and infinite monkeys, those things would have been there anyway. Maybe not exactly like that, but something along those lines.

In Progress: Dominic and Machete’s House

When I first saw Dominic and Machete’s House in Canterbury Commons, I was quite horrified by what I found. It was a total mess of rubble, litter, broken furniture and dirt. In order to be able to transform this into a believable living and working space, I had a lot of work to do: there was a burnt-out car in the living room, for heaven’s sake!