I have been creating The Witcher 2/3 mods, most notably while learning the radish modding tools during its eight trials. Of these, I have completed seven so far, covering basic quest design, custom entities, and advanced scenes and communities. I also got some experience using the Witcher 2 REDkit.
My work: Quest Design, Cinematic Design, Open World Content, Level Art
Duration: since April 2021, on average ca. 2h/week, ongoing
Personal Projects, done alone. W3 Modkit/Radish Tools. REDkit.
Open World Content
My latest achievement during these endeavors is the setup of a more complex NPC community:
Cinematic Design
Before, I had created a longer cutscene involving character locomotion, camera movement, effects attached to actors, and different poses.
Quest/Open World/Cinematic Design
Currently I am designing and implementing a complete quest with the support of a partner who helps me with design and writing. Here are some stills from development:
In-game modding UI listing all the shots for the quest’s first scene. 
Screenshot of one quest phase’s logic as seen in the quest editor included in the radish modding tools. 
Flow and pacing graph for the quest’s plot. 
Manually edited YAML definition of layers containing points, areas, and NPC animation stations (“actionpoints”). 
Excerpt from WitcherScript code detailing custom functionality to be called in the quest graph.
I am planning to finish and release this quest as a mod on Nexus Mods.
Key Learnings
- Persistence triumphs over motivation. Maintaining a regular work schedule aids in the resolution of large challenges one step at a time.
- It takes a lot of effort to “secure a quest”, meaning to prepare logic for all the cases that could lead to the player breaking the quest.
- Scenes should have a choice or something very interesting to happen every 3–4 lines (at least in the Witcher games).
Gregor Sönnichsen 