#skyrimvr

Skyrim: Skills Menu

The skills menu work began early on in the process of developing Skyrim and was changed and improved throughout the duration.

The very first step was to take Todd's notes and put a visual stake in the ground we could build from.

I blocked in a very rough version in 3DS Max and animated the camera so we could begin the discussion about how this menu could work

There was always the idea of skills and perk trees as constellations (based on 3 from Oblivion) but it took on many different forms as we progressed.

At on point I was toying with the idea of the stars being distributed in the depth in space and only forming the constellation in the back out view but navigation felt to uncontrolled in that reality.

Early on I also tried to use Fume FX to create the nebulae using a sim with some decent results but the speed at witch I could create like this was limited due to the simulation time.

My first pass at pass at painting the oblivion constellations as nebula worked out pretty well so I decided to take that route. In some way I like these version better but I have to visually reinforce the colors associated with the different skill groups in the final painting.

Once I dropped my nebula paintings into the scene the final look of the menu started to come together.

At this point I was also iterating on the stars and lines and their animations so we could build the perk availability and unlocking UI mechanisms.

Once we has all of that I took some time to finalize the nebula painting and break them into layers to create parallax. The entire menu was one 3d file that contained the background, animating perk tree art, and nodes to attach the code built perk trees. As long as each piece was scaled from the center of the scene you would always see the layers line up correctly when you moved back to the origin in the menu.

As a nod to the heavenly nature of Sovengarde and the skills menu Noah Berry the environment lead and the artist making the Sovengarde skybox took my paintind and incorporated it subtly into the sky.

it’s extremely horny i know how to read

Me as Dovahkiin from Skyrim

Skyrim: Critter Team

Special note: Unlike many of my posts this post covers a team effort. In the following text I will outline the teams effort with a focus on my contribution.

Initially I had built the hawk as a decorative element for the game on a whim. It got a good response from the team.

Turn off add block on this page to see embedded video above

The critter team formed out of discussions among friends at work about adding more life to the world without the overhead of full actor forms similar to the hawk and some bats I had created.We wanted to take the idea further and add some collecting game play similar to alchemy plants but with more depth. It progressed organically with each of us chipping away at tasks in our extra time.

My initial effort was to model, rig, and animate a few creatures. The models were made to be extremely cheap with low draw calls so we could afford as many as we wanted onscreen. At the time I didn’t realize count would be dictated by ingredients.

I used a single lag bone (covered in a previous post) per critter to add secondary motion to their legs and antennae.

To help tell their story in the world I created clutter for the critter types when appropriate. For the bees I built a physics based hive for players to break off of trees.

I also modeled a bunch of supporting alchemy ingredients.

Our coder Jean added a lot of functionality to the script system to allow for simple motion of nifs through the world and searching for sub nodes in nearby refs. All of the things we needed for our designer Joel to help built out behaviors for the different critters.

Once we had a good solid pass we pitched the critters internally. It was important to us to get buy in from the team at this point because we needed help to place them in the world and add landing nodes to world assets. We also needed design to incorporate the ingredients into the alchemy system.

As other members of the team started pitching in Dan Lee started creating additional critters like the dragonflies and fish.

this reminds me of when i was on the train home slightly drunk from the night before with absolutely no sleep phasing in and out of consciousness and a name kept appearing in my thoughts… i cant remember the first name but the surname was parper. parp parper? i dont know

sam i never thought i would see your posts get this horny

Following our initial research, we shifted into several intense brainstorming sessions. We explored wide-ranging ideas, from interactive museums to portals connecting different eras. Although creatively rich, these concepts struggled to deliver the dynamic, deeply immersive gameplay we envisioned.

To sharpen our thinking, we revisited some of VR’s benchmark games like "Skyrim VR" and "Half-Life: Alyx." What stood out was the emotional impact of well-designed environments, how players felt dwarfed by towering mountains or found themselves nervously creeping through dystopian corridors. This reaffirmed that environmental scale, atmosphere, and interaction would be central to our project’s success.

Skyrim VR particularly influenced me; its ability to transport players into vast fantasy worlds through clever use of space and environmental cues was inspiring. It showed that VR environments need to feel not just "seen" but "inhabited."

Despite all these learnings, a gap remained: while we had numerous ideas, none fully captured a simple, achievable gameplay loop, something manageable within our timeframe yet engaging enough for players.

Realizing this, we concluded that our project needed a much clearer gameplay foundation. Our next step would be to critically assess our early concepts and blockouts.