A New Adventure - Detours

We're all time starved these days. Some of us are also resource starved, but that's an entirely different discussion.

It's not a secret that I'm a big fan of Skyrim - At least if you have noticed my profile picture. The world is massive, beautiful and fully customizable with a huge community behind it. As someone who is driven by mastery, I couldn't pass up learning the in's and out's of creating a full mod instead of just another video. It's surprisingly simple once you get into it, so long as you have a clear focus of your objectives. It makes me wonder why people so lazily release content with grammatical errors and basic mistakes that even I learned in minutes - You'd think they didn't really care about what they were making.

I did some basic armor re-texturing/coloring, using existing assets. Rather than overwriting existing models as a lot of such mods do, I created entirely new ones based on existing textures and meshes (No way I'm artistically good enough to use 3D tools to make my own - getting the color right was hard enough) and saving them off separately. Balancing stats, figuring out how to introduce them into the world in a cohesive manner, building recipes, assigning attributes, and making sure your work doesn't conflict with others seems to me to be a very good low-level introduction into the world of development. Fascinating. For now, even though my mod isn't released (Just don't feel like doing a FEMALE version of all the armor... Yeesh) because I won't release anything I'm not happy with or I think is incomplete, I think I've seen all I wanted to from this perspective.

So back to UO - I haven't even really played it in the last few months. Things have been so hectic that paying a subscription for something I would have minimal amounts of time to play seemed superfluous. I am, however, getting the itch to play and produce something again. I find myself lollygagging (Ha!) because it means at the very least, I need to purchase some software and a microphone. The benefit of doing a Skyrim mod was that everything I needed I already had. Everything I DIDN'T have was available for free. And my PC may be able to record UO while playing it, but just barely.. Plus, I don't know if I'd be able to stay focused enough to not go on random diatribes about systems in the game.. Perhaps I'll make that my introduction and get it out of the way (It'd be a LOOOOONG one) and focus more on the game as it actually works in future videos.

I'll have to think on it. I haven't stopped thinking about this project. I'm not calling it off, and just like any good product, I won't release it until it's ready.

Thanks for reading.