Since I got my hands on games such as Minecraft and Skyrim, I’ve been inspired to make games myself. I’m sure all gamers who read this know the inspiration that strikes in how to improve a game or work a new narrative into its play. Luckily, there is modding.

My first mods, for Minecraft, Rimworld, and Skyrim, I mostly kept to myself. I had self-image issues back then, and showing my passion work online wasn’t in the wheelhouse. When I started getting more confident, the projects I initiated got more public, such as the discontinued Skyrim ReQuest, aimed at revamping quest(lines) which deserved a little more attention than they got.

One of my greatest achievements to date  is the community that I was able to help foster around the Stormworks Modding Community as it grew.

Modding from Scratch

Stormworks is a vehicle simulator game with an excellent voxel-based vehicle editor. While the creation of vehicles feels wonderful, the over world in which they are used feels bland.

Joining the game’s modding scene was like entering new frontiers. I joined a community fired up about developers, and disassociating with a game that they previously spend thousands of hours on. Modding tools did not exist, and my first attempts were hacked together in a sleepless evening by handwritten xml and a bodged python .mesh converter so I could modify models in blender.

My experience wasn’t particularly great starting out, and having to be the one that made the modding tools for once felt exhilarating,

Creating modding tools from scratch means opening files, understanding their architecture, and then having to create methods to replicate these. In example of xml, understanding and modifying is easy.
In case of files such as Geometa’s .mesh format, Its gritting work to get from there to a human readable .obj (which is also openable by blender).

User CodeLeopard contacted me. Leopard was working on a world editor, and created a command line tool to convert models and their physics to .ply and back. We’d work together to create and improve this tooling, and on the project “North Sawyer Overhaul”.

Talented people joined the community to improve the game. User Dheix created tools to change textures and the geometry used in the games map UI. Dheix and me had correspondence on the shaders in the game, which were done with common OpenGL. Dheix blew off the ceiling with his shader for the game “Opal”.

User Jebidihah found out that the developer’s steam ID were hardcoded in the game, to give them access to their internal tooling for vehicle components and tiles. While the id was hardcoded, with a tool such as cheat engine you could change their ID to yours, meaning you’d get access to their development tools on the client side.

Over the last three years of my presence in this community, I’ve noticed a lot of fire towards the developers being turned into constructive criticism. As mods started becoming more prevalent, I’ve heard from community titans who are getting back into the game. Time will tell the future of Stormworks, but I’m excited to be there during these times of growth.

The long haul

I hope I’ve shown the principle that no human is an island if it comes to modding (and development as a whole).
Although I don’t feel like I’ve fully discussed what it means to me being a mod developer without mentioning the long haul that projects take.

Because why do modding projects take all these years of work?

Modding is a niche that is difficult if outright impossible to monetize. In most instances, like for me and the NSO team, we don’t want to charge money to user our improvements at all, instead opting for donations so we could work just a little more often.

This turns modding from an activity that can be done on the side to an activity that must be done in our free time (which further underlines the importance of community).

Developing tools, adjusting for updates, and handling organization for a team alone cost days of work. That is excluding the work done to actually work on the project itself. Adjust for the weeks of work required to be distributed between everyone’s “free time” schedule, and you’re landed with months to years of development time.

The project which started this, NSO, is the age of a toddler by the time of writing this. I received help from the wonderfully passionate OffensivePlayer, which has increased turnaround time as he’s been taking over more and more of the production work.

I’ve understood my task has shifted for this project from implementation to organising, motivating, and setting targets for the team, and handling communication in the community and outside. I’ve taken this as an opportunity to engage with the AGILE team tools I’ve learned about during college and my time at Tetrascape, but never practiced.

To summarise all, I’m glad to have been able to grow the stormworks modding scene to what it is now, and to be able to continue encouraging growth within the community.
I hope this piece shows the effort and passion from multiple individuals that goes into modding.