Wyrm in the Waste
Game: Fallout 4
Engine: Creation Kit
Development Cycle: 8 Weeks
Development Info
Design Achievements
Created a main quest with accompanying side quests that allowed for a demonstration of progression
Created four unique boss-type encounters that fit in with the game’s style
Created gameplay balanced for both ranged and melee combat
Glamour Shots
My Cells
Sigurd’s Homestead
This little exterior cell is the hub that my mod revolves around. I designed this little hovel and its accompanying spaces to feel small and homely. 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, after I created the story, I realized that a large house wouldn’t fit with the story. 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.
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. While thinking about where a reclusive man with an affinity for animals might live, I settled on having Egil and Fafnir live in a cave on the side of a lake. When it came time to actually put together what the inside of the cave should look like, I pushed for more of a shallowroot dirt cave. This cave is right beside the water’s edge, so there would obviously be some kind of vegetation nearby, so this cave should have some signs of that. However, just littering roots everywhere wouldn’t really make for good gameplay, so I tried relying on rocks with glowing fungi (to provide light) to break up the floor plan while putting roots along and around the walls of the cave, that way the hints of vegetation are still there, but they aren’t impacting the gameplay.
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
Process went smoother than previous projects in engine
What Went Wrong
Technical issues
Engine problems and hardware problems on developer end prevented some features from getting implemented
Lack of focus in one particular cell degraded its quality until late into the project
Burnout on engine towards end of project led to reduced efficiency
What I learned and am taking forward
QA testing frequently and early on is incredibly important
Smaller, more focused scenes really do make a world of difference
Sticking to what was in documentation and keeping scope manageable can save headache when things go wrong