The Abyssalight Caverns is a dungeon level mod created for Skyrim, using the Skyrim Creation kit level editor. I worked on this project from September 2024 to December 2024 over a span of about three and a half months as a solo project. I created the project with the intent to deliver a fun and interesting experience within 10 to 12 minutes of gameplay, while also trying to make a level that could feasibly fit into the world of Skyrim.

 

This level contains four sections, as well as a variety of different enemies, pillars with engravings that talk about the story behind the dungeon, as well as a bit of a different aesthetic that helps it to stand out from the rest of the game visually, while not appearing too far-fetched from the other parts of the game. The player's main objectives within this dungeon are to find their way through the depths of the caves, battle their way through the enemies they find, defeat the boss at the end, and collect the loot that is waiting for them.

 

For this project, I not only wanted to build something that provided a bit of environmental storytelling, but also something that provided an interesting atmosphere and generally gave off the feeling of a place that became stranger and stranger the deeper you go, which is why their tend to be less and less humanoid enemies and less man-made structures the deeper the player descends into the caverns.

 

As my first project not only working within the Skyrim mod kit, but also within the Creation engine as a whole, I found the most challenging aspect of development to be enemy management and how to edit them, as this engine tends to handle NPCs and enemy characters in a unique manner, as well as rearranging different terrain elements across the level to better suit the enemy AI, allowing them to have an easier time navigating the environment. At first, I found that editing enemy stats proved to be a bit of a challenge, which I quickly overcame, yet I had to do a lot of editing to the navmesh to get it to function properly with some of the rougher terrain.