19-year old spends a year to create massive Skyrim mod
Behind Falskaar, a massive new Skyrim mod, and the 19-year-old who spent a year building it
A new mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Falskaar, was released over the weekend, and it is quite a doozy. Falskaar adds almost 25 hours of content, a land mass a third the size of the original game, new characters, new voices, and dozens of quests. As impressive as it is, though, it’s nowhere near as impressive as the creative force behind it: Alexander J. Velicky, a 19-year-old gunning for a job with Bethesda with his first try at modding Skyrim.
“I organized everyone involved, but the voice actors themselves recorded all the dialogue and submitted it to me,” Velicky told me. Though over 100 people contributed in some way, including composing an original soundtrack, Velicky took their contributions and plugged them into Falskaar himself. “I had some people help me out with a few models and textures, someone wrote a book or two for me… But otherwise all content was implemented, written and developed by me.”
So how does a 19-year-old take the helm of a creative project of this size? Velicky wants a job. He graduated from high school over a year ago, and instead of finding a design school, he turned Bethesda’s Creation Kit into his classroom, spending 2,000 hours over the last year building Falskaar.
“My dad was incredibly supportive and allowed me to live here, paying for living expenses and charging no rent,” Velicky says. “I was able to not go to school and not have a day job. Meaning, more or less, that Falskaar was my day job.”
The mod is fully voice-acted by 29 voice actors playing 54 characters and the quality is much higher than most community-made content. “I’m still kind of shocked at some of the talent I got on the project… and every single one of them surpassed my expectations by leaps and bounds.”
A massive dungeon, “Watervine Chasm,” may be Falskaar’s crowning achievement. It took Velicky three weeks to build and players report it takes an hour or two to complete. The community response has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Falskaar isn’t perfect,” Velicky says. “I’m not an expert who’s been crafting game experiences for the last 20 years, so I certainly still have a lot to learn, and I always will. I’m always looking to learn and improve, and Falskaar was a huge chance for me to do this.”
According to Velicky, Bethesda is aware that he’s out there, and he isn’t shy about putting his goals right out on the table. “The best way to show Bethesda Game Studios that I want a job there and should be hired is to create content that meets the standards of their incredible development team.”
Falskaar is available now on Skyrim Nexus, and I encourage you to check it out.
omg. omg, bless you, anon. do you know how great it is to get questions like this.
so for those of you who are not yet up to date on the saga of There Are A Bunch Of People Spying On You And It’s Not Cool: there are a bunch of people spying on you! it’s not cool. (nearly everyone is already caught up on this, but it never hurts to have a refresher.)
some of the people spying on you include:
the gov’t of the united states and the uk (and, to a lesser extent, canada, new zealand, and australia, and to a much lesser extent other allies of the us). for example— the nsa analyzes your texts and facebook chats, reads your emails to friends and family, monitors your bank transactions and web browsing activity (source) in the name of Fighting the War on Terror. the dea tracks license plates so they know where you’re driving and your phone calls in & out of the country (source and source) in the name of Fighting the War on Drugs.
various corporations (google, facebook, apple, microsoft, advertising companies and data brokers you’ve never heard of.) there are third-party trackers on almost every website you visit (for example, on tumblr, there are third-party trackers from codexis radar, dynamic logic, google analytics, research now, and scorecard research beacon.) these trackers put cookies on your computer so they can see what websites you visit and collect information about you so they can send you ads/jack up prices on various websites depending on how rich you are. (staples has done this.) they also hand over your data to the government (see above).
hackers and criminals who wanna steal your credit card info/use your computer as part of a botnet for ddos attacks and other superfun stuff/just fuck with you.
it is a Dangerous Internet Out There, folks.
but it is not hopeless! it is at its core a political fight like any other political fight, and it’s one that can be won. (sopa and pipa went down in flames; the battle for net neutrality looks good so far, crossed fingers. mass surveillance can have its ass kicked like anything else.)
and there are people right now (like the electronic frontier foundation and the aclu) working on changing laws, getting existing laws enforced, and arguing laws in court so that this kind of surveillance is less possible. there are journalists and leakers like glenn greenwald, jeremy scahill, and edward snowden working on getting all this known and publicized! there are hackers and activists like jacob appelbaum doing… whatever it is jacob appelbaum does, i dunno, he seems to have a good time.
and while they fight various battles to protect you, you can do plenty of things to protect yourself. for example:
download privacy badger and ghostery, extensions for your browser that block third-party trackers.
download https everywhere, another extension that secures your browsing and keeps you safe from hackers when you, for example, put your credit card info into amazon.
use spideroak, an online storage system, instead of dropbox; dropbox doesn’t protect the privacy of your files the way spideroak does.
use startpage, a search engine, instead of google; it gives you exactly the same results as google would, but it doesn’t share your data like google does.
download tor, a web browser that allows you to browse privately and hides where your signal’s coming from.
use the instant messaging apps wickr and cryptocat, which are encrypted. (have now downloaded wickr myself! can confirm: absurdly user-friendly. do the thing.)
if you can, learn how to use pgp as email encryption. i am SUPER HAPPY TO TEACH YOU and it’s not difficult but it’s got several steps to it and this post has gotten long enough as it is
you’re not ignorant for not knowing about this stuff! most people don’t have the proper education on how to cover their asses on the internet. but it’s really, really, really important to do if you want to work in activism, journalism, law or anything legal, or if you’re just someone who doesn’t want to be spied on by mouthbreathers who pass around your naked photos.
My friends and I occasionally have this problem so I’ve taught them this simple method that takes less than a minute as opposed to waiting several for your computer to restart(especially if it’s slow).
What’s great about this method is that sometimes restarting your computer wont fix the problem, but this usually will.
MAKE SURE YOU CLOSE ALL YOUR ART APPS.
This is important, otherwise the changes wont take effect. If it doesn’t work the first time, try again, sometimes it takes restarting it more than once.
For Windows 8, search for “services.msc” in your apps and click on the result. Continue from there!
While I have their individual versions buried deep within earlier Tumblr posts, I don’t think I ever put the entire crew side by side with their original bobbing animations.
These were the first true animations I did with each of the characters, basically testing the boundaries of their front facing puppets, experimenting with secondary action, and seeing how far you could bob each character before you started to break it.
Additionally, if you wanted a basic idea of how the puppets themselves were constructed, I included a screenshot of the wireframes of the puppets, which shows you the boundaries of individual symbols.
How in the world can people have such beautiful hair and it not look like it is dying?! I WANT TO KNOW THEIR SECRETS! So gorgeous. :3 And the styles.
Hair porn, guys. This is it.
SIT Y’ALLS MOTHERFUDGING ASSES DOWN BECAUSE I’M GETTIN ANGRY.
DYE DOES NOT KILL YOUR HAIR. I DON’T KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I CAN TELL PEOPLE THIS. BLEACH. BLEACH KILLS YOUR HAIR.
with that being said, it’s relatively easy to repair your hair. DO YOU KNOW HOW EASY?! WELL IMMA TELL YOU.
BUY ALMOST ANY GODDAMN CONDITIONER. 3 MINUTE DEEP CONDITIONERS WORK BEST BUT STILL. 3 DOLLAR WALMART STUFF WILL DO YOU A WHOLE FRACKING WORLD OF GOOD. YOU SLATHER YOUR HEAD IN THAT SHIT AND LEAVE IT ON FOR A HALF HOUR. TADA MOTHERFUCKER. TA-FUCKING-DA. YOUR HAIR IS GONNA FEEL SO MUCH BETTER.
YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE WORKS? NOT WASHING YOUR GODDAMN HAIR EVERY DAY LIKE A LUNATIC. THAT’S BAD FOR YOUR HAIR. AFTER BLEACHING YOU SHOULD WAIT TO WASH IT FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN STAND. DO YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE THE NATURAL OILS REPAIR HAIR BETTER THAN ANYTHING YOU CAN BUY AND YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE? IT’S FUCKING FREEEEEEEEEEEE.
NOW, THE THIRD WAY TO MAKE YOUR GOD DAMN GLORIOUS HAIR LOOK NICE AFTER BLEACHING IS TO TRIM OFF THE MOTHERFUDGIN’ DEAD ENDS. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CLIP DEAD ENDS ANYWAYS.
THE DYE DOESN’T DAMAGE YOUR HAIR. IN FACT, IT CONDITIONS A LITTLE BIT. ESPECIALLY VEGETABLE BASED DYES LIKE MANIC PANIC AND STUFF. BASICALLY ALL THE FUN COLORS. PLEASE STOP TELLING PEOPLE WITH DYED HAIR THAT IT’S GONNA TURN TO SHIT. WE KNOW. WE ALSO KNOW HOW TO AVOID IT BECAUSE WE’RE NOT AS IGNORANT AS YOU WERE AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS POST.
NOW YOU MIGHT ALSO BE THINKING “FINE BUT THIS BITCH DON’T KNOW SHIT”
WRONG MOTHERFUCKER. I FINISHED ALL MY APPRENTICE HOURS TO BECOME A HAIRDRESSER BEFORE QUITTING. MY HAIR HAS BEEN EVER COLOR OF THE FUCKING RAINBOW AND THEN SOME. PERSONAL EXPERIENCE MY FRIEND. MY HAIR IS STILL SOFTER THAN A FUCKING KITTEN.
LASTLY, EVEN BLEACH ISN’T THAT BAD IF DONE PROPERLY. ALTHOUGH I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT, YOU CAN BLEACH YOUR HAIR TWICE IN ONE DAY (PROPERLY) AND STILL BE RELATIVELY OKAY. DON’T BE STUPID, PLEASE TALK TO YOUR HAIRDRESSERS BEFORE TRYING ANYTHING ON YOUR OWN. DRAGON OUT.
i may or may not have gotten angry
OMG BLESS YOU
THANK YOU!
I HAD MY HAIR BRIGHT-FUCKING-RED FOR A WHILE, AND I GOT CONSTANT REMARKS ABOUT HOW THE COLOR WILL MAKE MY HAIR SHITTY.
STRANGERS NEED TO CALM THE FUCK DOWN AND EDUCATE THEIR ASSES!
I DON’T EVEN FUCKING USE SHAMPOO - JUST A DOCTORED UP CONDITIONER! LIKE THE BADASS UP THERE SAID, LEAVING CONDITIONER IN YOUR HAIR MAKES IT SO DAMN SOFT ITS RIDICULOUS.
SHAMPOO ALSO THROWS THE PH OF YOUR HAIR OFF! YOUR SCALP IS SUPPOSED TO BE MILDLY ACIDIC, AND THOSE DETERGENTS STRIP OFF THE REPAIRING OILS *AND* MAKES IT BASIC!
YOU DON’T WANT BASIC-ASS HAIR!
SO I TOSS A FEW TABLESPOONS OF LEMON JUICE INTO MY CONDITIONER BOTTLE, SHAKE IT UP, SLATHER SOME ON MY HEAD, WASH THE REST OF MY GORGEOUS BODY WHILE THAT SHIT SOAKS IN, THEN RINSE LIKE A BOSS.
WORRIED ABOUT NOT BEING ‘CLEAN?’ FORGET IT! CONDITIONER + LEMON JUICE WORKS JUST AS WELL, LIFTING DIRT AND SWEATY SKIN CELLS OUT OF YOUR GLORIOUS MANE.
NO NEED FOR EXPENSIVE SHAMPOOS OR SALON CONDITIONER - THE 3-DOLLAR ‘SUAVE’ OR WHATEVER GENERIC-ASS CONDITIONER YOU WANT WILL WORK JUST AS WELL! (actually, the cheaper the better - cheap conditioners tend not to have silicones added, which weighs your hair down, and needs strong detergents to strip out, continuing the cycle of expensive products.)
SO YEAH! CANDY COLORED DYE + CHEAP CONDITIONER + LEMON JUICE - SHAMPOO = GLORIOUS, PUPPY-SOFT HAIR AND LESS DANDRUFF FROM AN UNHAPPY SCALP!
*I also add two drops of mint and rosemary essential oils to my shampoo, along with the lemon juice. Those oils repel ticks/fleas/lice AND smell magical together*
