Howdy folks, and Happy Holidays! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and a fulfilling end to your 2023! This post is going to be quite a bit longer than the others but not without good reason. I just wanted to provide an update for Fallout 4: Not of Planet Earth, recap all of my 2023 Accomplishments, provide my plans for 2024, and I even have a little post-Christmas present for you all.
First things first, here’s my update for Not of Planet Earth: We’ve started landscaping Camp Andromeda! I’ve completed the Void Tunnel level in its entirety and have finally moved onto building Camp Andromeda. I knew this was going to be a big project but, little did I know, it’s going to be much bigger than I thought when I had the idea last year. Camp Andromeda is going to be pretty damn big! However, I’m learning so much about the Creation Kit and the tools I hope to use when and if I get a career at Bethesda Game Studios. There’s much more work to be done and I’ll provide another update on this at the end of January. I don’t have a release date for you yet, but landscaping and getting all the landmarks down for Camp Andromeda will likely take the most amount of time during this whole project. I’m aiming for a Summer/Fall 2024 release, though!
Okay, let’s move onto 2023 and just what I’ve accomplished this year. I started this blog in early March this year and, honestly, I’m amazed I kept up with this and the whole modding hobby. It feels really refreshing and motivating that I’m actually following through with much of what I’ve been planning on doing. That’s why 2023 has been one of the best years of my life. Because of that, I wanted to recap everything I’ve done so I can look back to this year as the starting point of my journey to being a Game Designer.
Starting with the start, I reined in 2023 with the goal to change my life. I decided that 2022 would be the last year where I settle with what I have and 2023 would be the first year I work hard for what I dreamed of. So, I decided to set the goal of getting a job as a Designer at Bethesda Game Studios. Alongside that, I decided to learn the tools I knew I needed to learn in order to be a good designer. So, I started with the Morrowind Construction Set. I knew I wanted to start small plus it’s a tool I’ve used before. A few years ago, I had made a house in Vivec’s Foreign Quarter in the Morrowind Construction Set called “Goran Manor” mostly because I just wanted a house in Vivec. This time, I wanted to make a home on Solstheim. On top of that, I wanted to include a few new features. I wanted to have a fireplace where you could put firewood and light it up. That led to me wanting a wood-chopping station outside where players could walk up and chop wood to get logs to throw into the fireplace. I learned how to make a Morrowind NPC, Dialogue, Basic Papyrus Scripting, very basic modeling, and how to clean it all up as to not conflict with other mods. This project took me a little over two months to finish then I released it to Nexus Mods. While doing this mod, I even updated Goran Manor to be compatible with Morrowind Rebirth! When I finished, I felt no burnout. I felt motivation. I felt hungry for more. I felt accomplished and I felt confident. For the first time ever, I genuinely believed that THIS is what I was meant to do and Bethesda Game Studios is where I’m meant to do it. Because of that, I wanted to revive an old project that I had started then lost after replacing my PC: The Hidden Tomb of Hircine.
I had the idea for The Hidden Tomb of Hircine way back in, I believe, 2015. I built Golgan’s Lair once (although his name back then was Grolgan), and I had started work on the next level only to lose all my work when I built my new PC. I tried to transfer my documents from my old hard-drive but was unsuccessful in doing so. Losing all my progress broke me and I didn’t touch the Creation Kit since then. That is, until March of 2023. At the end of March/beginning of April, I opened it back up and thought of a fresh story for The Hidden Tomb of Hircine. Initially, the Tomb of Hircine was going to be in Skyrim, not on Solstheim. Ultimately, I figured tying the tomb to the end of the Bloodmoon Expansion for Morrowind was going to give the best angle for a cohesive story. I still feel like that decision was the best one. I worked for over four months on that project and it was filled with periods of “Developer’s Block” and slight burnout. But, after completing Golgan’s Lair and vacationing in London, I came back better than ever and knocked out The Ruins of Mortrag, then the Sanctum of Hircine. The goal was to finish the entire mod by the time Starfield launched and that’s exactly what I achieved. I learned how to snap together pre-made cave and tomb kits, slightly more advanced Papyrus scripting, Skyrim dialogue (with voiceover!), placement of enemies and loot, creation of enchantments and weapons, and, again, how to clean it all up and fix bugs. This project, as of right now, is the biggest project I’ve ever finished. Not of Planet Earth will be the biggest once that’s released!
Even though Starfield had released and I had a solid build for The Hidden Tomb of Hircine, I still had the itch to mod. I jumped back into Morrowind and played Tamriel Rebuilt. After exploring much of Morrowind’s Mainland, I stumbled across Old Ebonheart and instantly fell in love with the city. It felt populated, alive, and fun to explore. It genuinely felt like a place I’d live if I were a character in Morrowind. In fact, that was my next project. I made a very small, yet very stressful mod adding two different options for housing in Old Ebonheart called “Homes of Old Ebonheart”. I added an option to purchase a recently evicted home in the “poor” part of town as well as an option to rent out a room from a couple who lived in the “rich” part of town. This was more of a passion project, however I did learn a lot of personal skills related to scripting. I learned the mindset of using many different kinds of variables and dialogue options as well as Morrowind’s Journal Entries in Scripting which provided me the challenge of fixing a plethora of bugs because I was, in a way, biting off more than I could chew. It was a good learning experience, though, and am ultimately proud of the end result. This is the last project I’d actually finish in 2023 because, after that, I would start work on my next project, “Not of Planet Earth”, in Fallout 4.
Those are all my Game Development accomplishments for 2023! My personal accomplishments include not one, but TWO trips to Europe this year. One to London then again to Paris. London has turned into one of my favorite cities in the entire world. The people there are friendly, but competitive, transportation is EASY, and it truly is a beautiful city in many different ways. However, Paris is where I asked the love of my life to marry me and I was ecstatic when she said yes. 2023 has been a very stressful year, don’t get me wrong, but it was full of lessons where I ultimately feel grateful for everyone in my life as well as everything I’ve accomplished. I’m very ready to close the book on 2023 and to open a whole new one for 2024. Next, I’ll tell you exactly what my plans for 2024 are!
First thing’s first, we need to finish Not of Planet Earth! That’s where a majority of my time will be going during the next several months. I still need to landscape and craft all of Camp Andromeda in addition to creating all interior spaces, enemies, and just about everything else you could possibly imagine. However, progress is being made! That brings me to what I have planned for the rest of 2024.
My next project in the Creation Kit will be in Starfield! Right now, it’s titled “Mad Experiments”. This mod is inspired by both “Alien” and “Aliens”. You’ll see what I mean when that project releases! On top of these two individual projects, I’m also working with Arcane University on one of their Student Collaborative Projects called “Henantir’s Steamcrag”. I’ll be designing the very first Interior Dungeon that connects Skyrim to the mod’s Steamcrag level. This will, hopefully, lead the way to becoming part of the “Beyond Skyrim” team where I can design dungeons and spaces for all different parts of Tamriel and not just in Skyrim. This will help give me experience in a “team” setting since I have literally zero experience in that ballpark.
Lastly, the big one. I wanted to officially announce my last big idea for 2024. This project will be outside of the Creation Kit and will be made in either Game Maker or Godot. This next game is called, “Kingdom of Fire“. Taking inspiration from “Reign of Fire”, humankind is being enslaved and tortured by a civilization of dragons and dragon-kind after being awoken by Dwarves. Taking gameplay inspiration from Cuphead and Zelda/Pokémon, it’ll be a Pixelated 2D RPG with levels and boss-fights. I’m very excited to start work on this in the latter-half of 2024 and more details will come around then!
And that’s about it! Again, I hope you had a very Happy Holidays and an incredible 2023. I know it could’ve been a better year, overall, but trust me when I say sometimes all it takes is just the flip of a mental switch to make a year feel fulfilling. I wanted to leave you with one last post-Christmas present. A long time ago, probably over nine years at this point, I was working on a survival horror game in the Unity Engine. It was set in the SCP universe and I had actually made a demo for it. The project never finished and I’m not sure that it ever will, but I wanted to drop the demo’s download for you to try out! This is to show just how far I’ve come and how dedicated I am to make better games. SCP-001-J was a fan-project based on the SCP of the same designation, which you can look up on the SCP Foundation’s website. Just click the image below and you’ll be redirected to Dropbox where you can SAFELY and SECURELY Download the SCP-001-J Demo Folder by clicking “Download” toward the top.
Again, I hope you all had a Happy Holidays and I hope your 2024 will be full of all the amazing fulfillments and happiness you desire! Thank you so much for helping to make this year a great one! See you all next year! 🙂
– Casey Rozell
Nuclear Swords 