LE Dear Esther/Gone Home in Skyrim. How's that sound?

[8Rooks]

Hey - I've got an idea for a mod I've had kicking around for a while and I just thought I'd see if there was anyone interested in working on it.

(Sorry to make this my first post, but I haven't played Skyrim in a while and I've never really had a reason to post on any forums about it. Hopefully that doesn't seem too rude and isn't breaking any rules.)

tl;dr - I'm after a serious mapper/level designer who wants to do something artistic, to work on a mod that would play kinda like Dear Esther or Gone Home. No fancy scripting, animation, custom assets or anything like that - just an empty map, but good enough someone would want to walk around it for a while searching for clues.

Anyone still reading? I've worked on a couple of projects before that either failed to hold my interest or just never got off the ground. I did a lot of work on the most recent one - worldbuilding, character designs, plot outline, synopsis etc. - and I thought it'd be a shame to waste it. Then it struck me it'd be pretty easy to keep the gist of the story and move it into a fantasy setting, so why not a Skyrim mod? I don't want to go into pages and pages of breathless MY STORY IS THE BEST STORY EVER, so I'll just give you the general idea.

Again, it's basically setup like Dear Esther/Gone Home. The main character gets trapped in a closed environment - they're stuck in a "dungeon", but there's no monsters, or any other people at all. There's a reason why the place is empty - no-one gets stuck inside a poem :smile: and there's no shocking last-minute twist. Something pretty frightening happened to make everyone run for it, and the main character gets the general idea of what's going on fairly quickly. There's some element of mystery, but it's very clear in the end what happened.

There is one other person the main character gets to talk to, but this person doesn't have a physical body - so the protagonist wanders around, exploring, going through the stuff the people who used to live here have left behind and talking to this mysterious presence. After a while it becomes obvious there's several things they can do about the reason this place was abandoned, and the point of the story is to get them to choose one. There isn't a "right" answer - it's up to them to decide who the bad guy is, that sort of thing.

Now I'm a writer. I've never been paid to write or anything (though I've had some pretty neat freebies) but I have been doing stuff for a long time. I reviewed games and movies for a few different websites for five or six years altogether (I travelled round the UK and Europe a few times for the movie website) and again, I've done some work on a couple of modding projects - I did a complete script redraft for an iOS game, I did some story ideas for the Outcast remake (the fan remake in the Crysis engine, not the failed Kickstarter) and I originally worked on the idea for this project with a guy who's been in the games industry for years.

I can get you samples of my reviews, but they're either buried in the archives or deleted from the actual sites (because I haven't worked for those people for a while) so I won't link them here. I've been working on a bunch of short stories and novellas, though - this project wouldn't necessarily be anything like those but I've been putting some samples on a Tumblr (here it is) if you want some idea of how my attempts at fiction read and whether or not I can put words together in the right order.

I've never built anything with any game engine at all, though, never mind the Elder Scrolls Toolkit, and I don't have the time to learn. Trust me, I'm well aware how this probably sounds! (I've read any number of posts on ModDB saying I WRITE STORIES MY STORIES ARE AMAZING PLEASE LET ME WRITE A VIDEOGAME PLEASE.) But - what I'm asking for is basically an empty map. Obviously not just that, and it'd still potentially be a lot of work! It'd need to be carefully designed, laid out, tested and so on so someone would actually want to go hunting through it for documents, hidden objects and all the rest of it.

It wouldn't need complicated scripting, though (possibly the one bodiless NPC might need some?), no tons of custom art or audio, animation routines (there'd be virtually nothing to animate) or anything like that. All that stuff could certainly be added later, if it got finished and you wanted to swap out the stock assets! But the basic idea wouldn't need them.

I'd see it as an opportunity for a really good mapper/level designer to do a calling card that's, well, different - an entire little world where the point is to get players to wander around and stare at how awesome your work is, not kill everything in sight with the weapons from their favourite anime or build the biggest mansion ever or what have you. :smile: While I'd be providing the backstory to make this little world seem like an actual place, with a history and a reason for existing, a ton of lore and collectibles, etc. as well as an overall plot that'd (hopefully!) hold people's interest.

If anyone's read this far and none of that sounds remotely interesting/you think those stories I linked are ass/I'm coming across like an arrogant jerk/there's a million mods like this already and somehow I was too dumb to notice them, etc., etc. then no worries - it's not like I don't have other things to do (and I'm sure you do too). This can quietly fall off the front page and we'll all move on with our lives.

But if you've got some experience working with the Elder Scrolls Toolkit - real experience, not just I MADE A DUNGEON ONE TIME - and you like the idea of working on a project that would seriously stand out from all the armour replacements and hi-res textures and super-tough monsters and nude mods... then by all means drop me a PM saying what it is you've done and we can see if you think it's worth exploring this any further.