- Joined
- Jul 27, 2009
- Messages
- 2,615
- Age
- 33
- Location
- The seas be my home
- Gil
- 9
- FFXIV
- Rever Seurwit
- FFXIV Server
- Faerie
- Free Company
- Timber Owls <Owls>
It's a small indie game, you probably never heard of it... Anyway, I make mods for Baldur's Gate 3. I've been tracing back my creative continuity and it all really fell back to here, to be honest, so I'm going to share a little snippet of how I got to where I am in this modding community by looking at my creative origin. I really wanted to make stuff, just anything, and I wanted it to be mine. I did some roleplay, I tried GFX (and was not good at it), and after moving on I kept trying more things. I learned that one thing I am good at is being systems minded and understanding rules and their implications. My roleplay experience branched out into Dungeons and Dragons, where I turned my worldbuilding and creative systems-driven mind into a story engine and learned that the dark themes I played with in 2009-2011 were the early signs that I was the kind of person naturally drawn to tragedy. But that's not important for the modding I do now.
What really matters is that this is where my exploring began. Where I learned what a creative community was and how, even when you were me, a high school student who tried too many things to get good at any of them, the community can uplift you and drive you to make constant improvements. So I did, and my drive to try new things never faded, but I did learn to focus and get better and better at just one thing. Enter Baldur's Gate 3. Dungeons and Dragons and Video Games, I was so hooked. Problem was, I knew so much about D&D and I had such a creative drive to make a character for one specific mechanical purpose... And 5e does not facilitate that purpose. So I put myself to work and I opened their modding toolkit and applied myself to making my vision come true.
"I'll make it for me. I'll publish it because shame is a weakness. Nobody will like it, but I made it for me." That's what I said. I was not ready for what happened next. My mod was bad. And I don't mean that "Oh he's hard on himself" bad. I mean, there were AI generated icons that were absolute garbage (I didn't generate them, I used them from someone who shared ones they had generated). The mechanics were simple and basic, the more complicated ideas were poorly executed, and I had no idea how to use any of the tools I had at my disposal. Yet for some reason, it was getting attention. People liked it. But I didn't. It looked ugly and it barely worked as well as a pitiful amount of options. So I went back in immediately and started working. It would live up to my vision, and now I had eyes on me. It was grind time, baby.
I scoured for resources and sought out multiple modding and coding communities, and I even reached out for help, something I HATE doing, for the graphical side of things. The class and subclass icons I have were not done by me, but my experimenting with GFX tools here had me in a good spot to start doing mashups of vanilla game assets and forge together my own custom action and tooltip icons (Which I later shared as an open tool for anyone to use, because community means everything to me). Suddenly, I was able to apply my writing knowledge by utilizing themes and abilities to tell a story, I was able to use my mechanically driven mind to turn the systems inside out and create something that behaved how I wanted it to, and I was able to use my graphical experience to produce something of quality. I am immensely proud of what I have done.
It really all did start here and with this community, it all coalesced nice and cleanly into me finding success in a creative project that turned into something so much more grand than I could have ever expected. By now I'm sure there's curiosity, I am the author behind the Arcane Vanguard and the Veiled Votary. Is this a hard brag? Yes. But it's also a sincere shoutout to this community (at least, as it was over 10 years ago) for fostering this kind of growth in me. It really does all start back here. Give the mods a shot, they can be found in the in game mod manager. Arcane Vanguard is on console.
What really matters is that this is where my exploring began. Where I learned what a creative community was and how, even when you were me, a high school student who tried too many things to get good at any of them, the community can uplift you and drive you to make constant improvements. So I did, and my drive to try new things never faded, but I did learn to focus and get better and better at just one thing. Enter Baldur's Gate 3. Dungeons and Dragons and Video Games, I was so hooked. Problem was, I knew so much about D&D and I had such a creative drive to make a character for one specific mechanical purpose... And 5e does not facilitate that purpose. So I put myself to work and I opened their modding toolkit and applied myself to making my vision come true.
"I'll make it for me. I'll publish it because shame is a weakness. Nobody will like it, but I made it for me." That's what I said. I was not ready for what happened next. My mod was bad. And I don't mean that "Oh he's hard on himself" bad. I mean, there were AI generated icons that were absolute garbage (I didn't generate them, I used them from someone who shared ones they had generated). The mechanics were simple and basic, the more complicated ideas were poorly executed, and I had no idea how to use any of the tools I had at my disposal. Yet for some reason, it was getting attention. People liked it. But I didn't. It looked ugly and it barely worked as well as a pitiful amount of options. So I went back in immediately and started working. It would live up to my vision, and now I had eyes on me. It was grind time, baby.
I scoured for resources and sought out multiple modding and coding communities, and I even reached out for help, something I HATE doing, for the graphical side of things. The class and subclass icons I have were not done by me, but my experimenting with GFX tools here had me in a good spot to start doing mashups of vanilla game assets and forge together my own custom action and tooltip icons (Which I later shared as an open tool for anyone to use, because community means everything to me). Suddenly, I was able to apply my writing knowledge by utilizing themes and abilities to tell a story, I was able to use my mechanically driven mind to turn the systems inside out and create something that behaved how I wanted it to, and I was able to use my graphical experience to produce something of quality. I am immensely proud of what I have done.
It really all did start here and with this community, it all coalesced nice and cleanly into me finding success in a creative project that turned into something so much more grand than I could have ever expected. By now I'm sure there's curiosity, I am the author behind the Arcane Vanguard and the Veiled Votary. Is this a hard brag? Yes. But it's also a sincere shoutout to this community (at least, as it was over 10 years ago) for fostering this kind of growth in me. It really does all start back here. Give the mods a shot, they can be found in the in game mod manager. Arcane Vanguard is on console.