Role: Sole Developer
Year: Released January 2021
Updated: August 2022
Engine: Taleworlds Proprietary Engine (C#)
Platform: Desktop
Target Audience: History buffs, classical period Greece
Available at: Nexus Mods

Description:

This was the project that started my journey into being a games developer. it started as a drive to add one Greek inspired armour set as the game had none. It turned into a complete overhaul with armour, weapons, names, character profiles and families, new land/navmesh, new factions, new kingdoms, its own narrative of city state warfare.

What did I do:

• I created armours and weapons and iterated on both of these assets many times.
• I learned how to animate, how to weight paint and apply cloth physics.
• I learned how to navmesh on a proprietary engine and create explorable landmasses and new cities in scenes.
• I learned how to create images with overlapping shapes on a vector system.
• I spent a lot of time engaged in QA and feedback to improve the players experience and create a better more immersive setting.
  
  

Challenges:

The main challenge with this was being one of the first mods I had ever made. I had previously done a few little bits in Creation Kit for The Elder Scrolls and that was my limit. Here was an entirely new beast, much bigger than I anticipated. And it started with my desire to add hoplites to the game. I figured I needed one armour set. So I went out, conducted online research, and spoke to a couple of experts in the field and got some feedback. Despite having all this information I did not possess the technical skill to make these things at the time. And so it was a slow process, from making that first set that looked absolutely monstrous to making the later sets that a vast majority of people enjoyed including myself.
Once I made that set I put it online and feedback started to pop up, how things were wrong, how things did not look right, and so I used this feedback and went away and iterated on the set of linothorax, it was moving in the right direction but it was still poor quality to much of the audience, so I iterated again, this time toning down some of the brass colouring in favour of bronze. At the same time I was expanding the mod outwards, with each update I added something new and major as well as fixing the previous iterative issues or new issues that cropped up. There was one infamous issue where it did not equip armours to character, and so you would have the occasional nude body running across the battlefield…

One of the more noticeable features from the pictures is the improving iterative quality of the helmets and the body armours, and the size of the shields over time. The second gallery actually shows the very first and worst set and as it progressively got better over each iterative cycle. Ending with the two videos of linothoraxes to the left that never went to release.

Once players were mostly happy with this the next thing they wanted was a means to join a Greek city state faction, at first I tried to customise the default factions but they were hard coded at the time, and swapping them out was beyond my programming ability. So I opted to add some navmesh to an unused part of land, then added some towns, and set up a new faction and culture for the Greek states.

Next I wanted to expand on this game system and create my own gameplay loop within the game, which was Greek city state fighting. So I duplicated the factions, and split the towns between them and started the game with a 3 way war. The players seemed to really enjoy this and it was mostly bug issues and adding new and better equipment that was being asked for from that point forwards. Where I could I tried to add more, such as the banners update and a surprise update but the time required to add major content packs became unfeasible as each game update massively broke mods and required time to update and correct and I started university and thus continual updates became harder to maintain.

Eventually this caused the mod to fizzle out, and me to instead go and assist other mod teams with their mods and add assets when required or serve as a pointman in design features and further I made mine open source so others could use it as a base to make their own mods. Of which 8 mods spawned off of mine, and there have been many videos on YouTube of my mod either on its own or integrated with others.