Wyrm in the Waste
Game: Fallout 4
Engine: Creation Kit
Development Cycle: 8 Weeks
Development Info
Design Achievements
Created a Norse mythology- inspired main quest with accompanying optional side quests that allowed for a feeling of player progression
Created four boss-type encounters that fit in with the game’s style and played significantly into the story
Designed spaces and combat that capitalized on variance of playstyles
Glamour Shots
My Cells
Sigurd’s Homestead
This exterior cell is the hub that my mod revolves around. I designed this little homestead to feel small and homely, yet significant to the narrative. In the initial planning for the mod, I had envisioned this grand house on the coast for Sigurd and his son Sigmund to live in that worked with my Old Norse inspiration. However, a large house proved contradictory the story, so I pared down the actual house and developed the area around the house. Sigurd, in my mod, is a broken old mercenary that lives alone with his only son, Sigmund. A disgraced mercenary wouldn’t really live in a grandiose manor, but a humble farm that he and his son can manage and defend alone is much more in line with both Fallout 4’s world and with the story that I crafted.
Ingeborg’s Lab
This cell used to be the lab used by a friend of Sigurd that was adept at creating weapons. In the story, Ingeborg had recently been killed by a Supermutant named Grendel, so this high tech lab was meant to still feel pretty sterile compared to other places, but clutter and filth had started piling up due to the recent Supermutant habitation. In terms of actual gameplay spaces, I crafted the majority of the spaces around vertical combat that supports the Supermutant enemy type. This cell, unlike most others in the mod, actually features the option to avoid combat. While the other cells require the player to defeat a boss to acquire the goal object of the cell, this cell allows the player to sneak into the room with the goal object, which aids in the player gaining strength to take on the tougher fights of the mod more easily.
Egil’s Cave
In my mod’s story, Sigurd worked with a strong, silent type mercenary named Egil. Egil had a heart of gold and adopted and raised a young Yao Guai cub he named Fafnir, which eventually killed him. This cell was designed to be relatively straightforward, only currently inhabited by Fafnir and Egil’s other pets. While I did want two distinct encounters within this cell, I made sure that the first fight was much more manageable, especially since Fafnir was intended to be a much more difficult fight than both the mole-rate swarm and the Supermutants in Ingeborg’s Lab.
Lathgertha’s House
This cell was the home of Sigurd’s old lover (Sigmund’s mother). I built this cell around combat that suits ghouls well. All of the rooms where combat is present has a nice circular flow to allow for proper kiting of the ghouls. This initially proved to be a challenge when taking melee combat into account. In order to account for this, I decided to make the movables space small and a little cramped, that way players could create “trains” and make the ghouls more easy to manage.
Nidhogg’s Lair
Nidhogg is the beast (represented here in Fallout as a Glowing Chameleon Deathclaw) that slayed Sigurd’s mercenary crew and disgraced him. The story I crafted for this mod hypes Nidhogg up to be a horrible monster, known for mercilessly slaughtering hundreds of Commonwealth citizens, so his cell (labeled as a “lair”) needed to show carnage that demonstrated its malice. What I settled on for his lair was the remains of an old military base that Sigurd and his crew attempted to repurpose into the location for a last stand. After testing various elements, dozens of bodies and the rusted hulks of broken tanks went a long way to convey the sheer power of this monster. I tested a variety of different blocking obstacles to help create a good flow for combat in the room, but while the bulkiest of my options, tanks proved to be the best thematic element and provided enough pinch points to allow the player to escape from Nidhogg and still allow Nidhogg to have enough room to move in the space.
Postmortem
What Went Well
Scoped really well
Followed documentation
What Went Wrong
Technical issues
Engine update problems and hardware issues prevented some features from getting implemented (voice acting)
Lack of focus in one particular cell degraded its quality until late into the project