My first encounter with game development was working on a mod for Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy back in high school.
Luckily most mod tools were released, and it used the same engine as JK2, so I could bring over a lot of Jedi Outcast assets and using them in parallel with JK3's content to create new levels, scripts and interfaces.
While looking back at it, a big chunk of the mod feels pretty cringey, but it had some fun things:
- Secrets: The New Empire is full of hidden areas that need exploration or extra insight to find.
- "Meta" features: With mods, I always liked to develop surprising experiences which differ from what the base game provides. I had an elevator with buttons that could go to any floor, keypads for which you needed to find the code, on-the-fly generated puzzles (so that they are not the same between runs), etc.
- Non-story content: There are extra "warmup" levels which act as standalone challenges that the player can do (and their result persists).
- Extra settings: Some console-only cvars exposed to the UI, a resolution picker for widescreen monitors, configurable crosshair and the like.
- Lot of different maps and scripted events.
There were some cinematics (please don't judge the VO or the camera movement too harshly 🙏):
And some random experiments, like faking dynamic shadows:
Unfortunately I never manager to finish it, but the last WIP version is now on ModDB.