Creation Kit

(Discontinued)

The 2nd Quest - Intro

Day 2 - Quest Stages & Planning

Day 3 - Iteration (This is design after all)

Day 10 - Still Gathering

Day 11 - GATHERING COMPLETE

Day 12 - Spawning NPC's

Day 13 - Conjuring

Day 14 - Conjuring

Day 16 - I Missed a Day

Day 17 - Time Out

The 2nd Quest - Intro

After learning how to use the Creation Kit to work on Skyrim Special Edition I followed through the quest designer tutorial on the official Creation Kit website. I went through all the way to the final section, which had me add map markers and make sure that if Bendu Olo was killed that the quest would fail while doing it, etc.

I had various issues getting these final parts to work despite following 1 for 1 with the tutorial and decided to start on my own quest after a few days passed.

P.S. It isn't going to look like a lot is going on at first. I am spending a small amount of time each day in the Creation Kit and each day adding 1 minute to how long I work. Someday, this will be cool.

Day 2 - Quest Stages & Planning

I got 8 stages together for my second quest and started going through the Creation Kit creating a new quest and adding all of the stages in.

Enemy Attacks Player
Player Defeats Enemy
Player Finds a Note Nearby
Note Mentions a Madman Responsible for Attack & Travels to his Location
Player Can Help the Madman w/ Experiments (Quest ends if the player doesn't help)
Player Gathers Items for the Madman's Experiment
Experiment Goes Wrong & Player is Attacked Again
Player Defeats Enemies

The words that are in bold, within the numbered list, are for documentation purposes about what different actions the player will do or will have done to them. I want to make sure it doesn't get too repetitive within the quest.

Day 3 - Iteration (This is design after all)

Here on day 3 and I have started doing some iteration on the quest stages and I have begun plugging information into the quest display/objectives section. Despite going through the tutorial I need to spend more time going through the process before I can really get a grasp on things.

Due to this I have put a temp. enemy into the game and added a script to it where it starts the quest when it is killed. This helps me pull the concepts in the Creation Kit from abstraction into more understandable parts.

Day 4 - Iteration

Here on day 4 and I was able to solve some issues that I was having in the last quest I worked on. I got my objective markers to work after doing some research (reading through forms) and got the first two stages working and ready for playtesting.

I also created a note and put it into the "Rogue Experiment's" inventory for the player to interact with and read it. I feel confident doing a lot of the basics at this point and I feel like I can just get my ideas down and start iterating.

Just saying it again because I am that happy but I am ready to get iterating and designing now that I have the formalities of the Creation Kit out of my way.

Day 5 - Organization

Taking a step back in the blog I wanted to explain that I don't have a clear idea about the details that involve this quest. So that is why you will see a lot of "PLACEHOLDER" stuff. The only thing I have a preference for is that you are able to start the quest early into the game. However, having the quest early isn't even a requirement in my head. I am approaching this as getting the design down and then working on the smaller details later, which sounds good to me but I need to practice using this methodology more as I want to apply this to future game design projects.

Otherwise, today I had a foggy mind and had to put some plan together of what needed to be done. After doing some work in Jira I went into Creation Kit and created the Madman NPC, placed him into the world and then added some dialogue that didn't end up working, but that is ok for now.

Day 6 - Dialogue

Today was some messing around with NPC dialogue and I think I messed up something when I created the Madman NPC so that dialogue isn't working as intended. Even going through the tutorial on dialogue I wasn't able to fix my issues. So I will keep going at it and see if it was a problem on my end or if it was a bug.

Really chill day, a little upset, but hey, we'll get 'er done.

Day 7 - Dialogue

So the dialogue works now...

Something very weird was happening where I had a quick save that I could load into and the dialogue worked fine. However, if I loaded up an actual save of mine and went to test the dialogue the Madman NPC was speechless. After deleting the quick save, where it worked, and going back to my save, that didn't work, I got everything to pan out.

Now I am getting the gathering stage around and I am planning on using a location nearby for a placeholder area with some carrots or something along that line just to get the design down.

Also there is more dialogue then what is show in the screenshots but spoilers aren't fun.

Much better day.

Day 8 - Gathering

Working on all of the things needed for the gathering part of the quest. Instead of a location marked I have some placeholder cabbages marked. Except the issue is that I don't know how to work with cabbages. I thought they would be like the note that I made but they are slightly different and I am not sure how long it will take me to figure it out. I also ran into some more bugs with the dialogue not working despite not doing anything related to the dialogue today. That took some time but got sorted out in the end.

So I am going to do some research tomorrow on the topic and then we will be one step closer to a fully designed quest.

Cabbages man...

Day 9 - Gathering

I'd be lying if I typed that I got the gathering part of the quest working today.

I think I know what the problem is but I only figured it out late into my work so I didn't implement it. However, the leading theory is that I need a barrel that isn't empty to use as a template. I used an empty barrel template but I filled the inventory of the barrel with my quest gather item. It could be a bug but I think I am just messing with things that are above me at the moment.

At the moment I am just trying to get the gather items into a container of some sort while making that container anything but an NPC, since I've already done that.

Another day, another bug...

Day 10 - Still Gathering

Don't let the above images lie to you. I still didn't get my gathering stage complete today. I tried swapping objects in the world to objects in containers, like chests. Then I went to putting objects in a different placeholder wolf and that still didn't work for some reason. So something is seriously broken and I have to remove and re-add some content and see if that does anything.

If one more day goes by of this not working I am going to have to scrap this part of the quest and just move on. I didn't even have a timer set today, I just worked on this for a few hours hoping that all of my experimentation would pay off. So for tomorrow, I am rebuilding the gathering section top-to-bottom and if it doesn't work then I will revisit it after I have done a full implementation of the rest of the quest design.

This is a huge hangup and since I don't really have a pressing deadline this is a borderline time sink.

I thought making games was just as fun as playing them...

Day 11 - GATHERING COMPLETE

Now she ain't what I had envisioned from the start but she works and she can call herself a gathering stage. So now I got two stages in the quest working, the beginning and the end of the gathering portion and I get to work on the rest of the quest design now. I am super happy that I was able to resolve my issues and it came down to deleting & rebuilding scripts, stages, aliases, etc. and not to mention constant unload and reload of my mod in the main menu.

In short, it worked and I am happy. As you can see in the screenshots I put it as a quest complete after gathering but this was more to just let me have some more feel good time IF it worked. So it was a long-winded pat on the back with no guarantee. Almost like gambling or just a risky investment.

So tomorrow I can start on getting more interaction and combat underway for the quest and we'll be peachy.

Day 12 - Spawning NPC's

Today was a research day, except I actually got some valuable things researched. At the moment, I am working on getting some NPC's to spawn and attack the player after the player completes the gathering section. I have two ways researched:

Conjuring spell to cast and that spawns the NPC's
Simple placement of the NPC's at a location and send them to attack the player

The difference is the particle that happens when you cast a conjuring spell. I haven't tested either method so I will probably start by implementing the second way and then later if I want I can switch to the spell way for the added VFX.

Tomorrow is testing, and I am much more confident about approaching problems in the Creation Kit now that I found all the functions I can call in Papyrus within the editor. Coming from Unity and the Unreal Engine documentation and API is too helpful, especially when little to no YouTube videos are available.

Day 13 - Conjuring

The research came in handy and I am glad that I got two sources. The first source that I was going to try ended up stumping me as the function took some properties that I was very unfamiliar with. Needless to say, I worked on the spell conjuring function instead and that worked out great.

As you can see the Madman now has a familiar but it should be a few failed experiments that want to kill the player character but I got what I wanted done for the day. I am really happy about the effect and how it is turning out. I am also excited since the quest is very close to being fully designed at this point and I can start iterating on it soon.

Little side note, I know this is kind of a casual portfolio show piece and a personal experiment but if you are reading this I really appreciate it. Mainly since I would never believe anyone to read this, especially unless they had to. So if you ever want to talk then shoot me an email, it would be cool to have a conversation with whoever you are, reading this.

SkyrimSE_ConjureWolf.mp4

SkyrimSE_KillMadman.mp4

Day 14 - Conjuring

Working out more on the conjuring front I tried to spawn multiples and I couldn't do it, that is what you see in the left video. So afterwards, I tried to get them to spawn after the previous one dies. This didn't work either and I have yet to figure out why that is but more testing will get done.

Then I ended up attacking the Madman after trying to kill the conjured experiment and when I killed him the quest didn't fail so I put some code in and the results you can see on the right video.

Had a great idea, I am going to treat these like standup meetings and go over what I have done, what I am going to do and what are my obstacles, or "blockers." Then if I am feeling particularly energized I will add more paragraphs of flavor under that. So, you get the brief and then you get the spice, the sauce, the whatchamacallit.

Yeah....

Day 16 - I Missed a Day

I didn't work yesterday, not cause I wanted to skip, but it just ended up happening.

Completed:

Nothing

Working on tomorrow:

Getting multiple enemies to spawn for final stage

Blockers:

Bug preventing quest objective marker & quest stage text showing

Flavor:

I thought that I would not work on difficult things that would take research and do a few smaller things that I THOUGHT I knew I could do. However, I worked on all the little things that I wanted to change and then booted up Skyrim and the first stage just stopped working. After a long while I ended up resetting a few things that I originally changed to see if the bug would fix in some way but it didn't. At the end of the day, I did a lot of work and none of it showed, in fact from an outside perspective I have seriously undone work.

I am starting to notice a pattern of working on this project, where I have really good days and everything makes sense and then I have really bad days where I take more than 1 step in the wrong direction. The silver lining is that after trying to fix the issue for long enough it ends up working out and life is good.

Lesson of the day: Don't give up!

Day 17 - Time Out

I am going to work on a creating game in a week so progress on the mod will halt for the time being. I feel like I need to bunker down on something really intensely for a little bit and it also gives me some time to reflect on the other work I have been doing, like this.

Also, I think it is really funny that right above this it says, "Don't give up!" Don't worry I will never give up on the game dev dream.

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