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Bandit Island

Skyrim Creation Kit

Details:

  • ​​10 - 15 minutes of gameplay

  • Learning to use the Skyrim Creation Kit

  • Focus on Environment Design/ World Building / Navmesh

Level Narrative

The player is tasked with sailing to an island off the coast of Skyrim to deal with some bandits who have been using it as their base to plunder.
 

Learning a new editor

Initial Landscape

As I was learning a totally new editor I wanted to start off simple by creating the landscape. A small island where I could practice with other tools that the engine provided. I then started to iterate on the landscape slightly, making the space more interesting.

Developing the Environment

I then continued to expand on building out the island by adding more roads, caves, points of interest and much more. I did this to give the player more defined routes to explore. Additionally I added a town to the edge of the island, this is a place where the player would first enter the space, collect quests, interact with NPCs etc. 

Bandit Camp and Navmesh

One of the main things I wanted to learn was creating spaces for combat. For this I made a small bandit camp with a couple enemies. The Skyrim Creation Kit requires you to handmake navmesh to enable to AI to move around so I had to learn this new tool. This gave me experience considering how the layout of an environment needs to support both player movement and NPC navigation. In addition I also created AI pathing, making enemies patrol and making some interact with the objects in the camp such as the forge. This system can be quite hard to get used to but once you get the hang of it you can work quickly and efficently.

What I learned

This project was primarily an opportunity to learn the Skyrim Creation Kit and experiment with a completely new level design tool kit. 
The project helped me develop an understanding of:​

 

  • ​Working within an existing games toolkit

  • Player navigation through roads, caves and points of interest

  • AI navigation and Navmesh

  • World building and creating environments from an initial landscape

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Most importantly it gave me experience learning a completely new engine from scratch and creating an environment within that engine.

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This was an earlier personal project of mine and unfortunately I no longer have access to the original files. That is why a lot of the level is unfinished. However, I would love to go back into the Creation Kit and create something new or recreate this and expand upon it.

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