About this video

Description:
Today we're launching the first episode of the Morrowind Modder's Challenge, a new series where you, the viewer, get to challenge me to make a mod in a mere four weeks. Now to sort of explain the premise here, the Modder's Challenge is basically a series dedicated to creating mods you guys want, recording the construction of the mod with commentary about the challenge and major design decisions, as well as what features get included and which have to get scrapped due to time limitations. In a way, the Modder's Challenge is all about time-management, because there's a very real possibility of failure with a mere four weeks to produce an entire mod. Obviously, the more difficult the challenge, the more likely that it won't be completed in time. Regardless of what happens, after four weeks the mod will be released on the Nexus, along with most of the mod documentation (such as quest documents, commented programming scripts, and flavor text) for you guys to play through and potentially learn from, since it can on occasion be useful to take an existing mod and sort of deconstruct it to figure out how it works. Though the Modder's Challenge is more of just a straight-up challenge series than a learning series like Let's Mod Morrowind, but there's always something you can potentially learn from these things.

How Challenges Work:
In any event, let me explain how challenges work. So basically, challenges are limited to content mods (Houses, Towns, Dungeons, Quests, Landmasses, NPCS/Dialogue, Companions). That's because I'm a content modder, that's where my skillset is, I can't for the life of me create a new texture or 3d model or a complicated gameplay rebalancing, that's just beyond where my skills are. But challenges involving creating dungeons, houses, towns, landmasses, quests, NPCs/dialogue, or even companions are all fair game. There are some limitations though, a challenge can only have a maximum of 5 interiors (10 if a majority are shacks), including dungeons, and a maximum of 5 quests. We have to keep the challenges somewhat realistic in terms of being able to complete them in a month, and obviously I won't be able to build an entire city with a new faction and 20 quests within a single month's timeframe, that's just not possible. But there's still a ton of cool mods we can make in just four weeks, just got to remember to keep our ambition in check.

Now for how challenges are selected, you'll have about 48 hours after a new Modder's Challenge video pops up on the channel to post challenges for mods you'd like to see, and you can make these as detailed and specific as you want, like a Telvanni manor located at the bottom of a mine shaft, or five random quests in the Ascadian Isles region, or a small village the player helps build in the Azura's Coast region. Any challenge you can think of, so long as it's in our content parameters, is acceptable, no matter how little or how much detail you put into it. After 48 hours, I'll collect every challenge submitted and create an online poll where you guys can vote for your favorite challenge, and the choice that gets the most votes will be the challenge we'll attempt that month and you'll get to see a new mod on the Nexus, whether finished or no, four weeks later. And obviously, if I can't finish a mod, I will try and get back to it at a later point and finish it off, but no telling when that would be, could be months or even a year, so if you really want to see a successful fully built mod, again try to be realistic about the scope!

The Challenge:
Since this is the first episode, I created my own challenge, which you guys can find below:
Build a Velothian House/Dungeon Mod that the player gradually unlocks over time, finding new parts of the dungeon, clearing them out, and then converting these parts into part of a larger player home over a series of quests. Can involve any type of tilesets, so long as the main house and intro dungeon are Velothian-styled, and the house should be purchasable at first.

I've decided to call the mod from this first episode "Of Dungeons and Abodes" (now available for download), which is a terribly generic name, but still. In the end, we ended up creating five interiors, including two dungeon interiors, and four quests involved with building up a manor and clearing out dungeons, so I'd say this first episode is a success.