mod testing AI-Built Quest Mod Prototype from a Noob – Crude, Early, and Desperate for Your Feedback (Code & Story Help Wanted!)

[moeboom]

I believe that the greatest contradiction in the current Skyrim LoversLab community is the contradiction between an overabundance of animation and clothing assets and the lack of story mods that actually stitch these assets together. And our community is now in, and will remain for a long time in, a state of story mod scarcity.

But the arrival of AI might change all of this. Before that, I had never even opened the CK, and I even wrestled with AI for five whole days before I understood that just because you copy a room doesn't mean NPCs can walk around in it freely—you also have to get navmesh data in there.

After an entire holiday of interacting with AI and spending about twenty dollars, I finally got some very minor but somewhat promising mod project documentation, and built a workflow: I create the story outline -> AI builds the script -> I polish the script -> hand it to AI to build the code -> I test -> AI adjusts the code based on bug feedback.

For the next month and a half, due to personal reasons, I won't be able to continue pushing this project forward. So I'm planning to share a very crude early engineering verification document here. Because its completion level is too low, I can't put it on the official mod release page. I hope to get everyone's feedback here—whether it's about specific story ideas for the future, or problems with the current system. But most importantly, I'm eager to get advice and suggestions from the forum's excellent mod developers about the current issues in the code. As someone who has never touched programming, let alone game development, I can't clearly point out the misconceptions in the AI's work, which makes the AI's engineering efficiency extremely low.

Any advice would be extremely valuable to me. This is my first time systematically learning about and carrying out software project development (after all, I come from a finance background). I've had a tremendous amount of fun throughout this process, and I hope to eventually turn that fun into something visible and share it with everyone. Thank you!

[moeboom]

1. Story Outline

 

A shop under the Temple of the Divines in Solitude sells exactly one thing: defeat. The player is a powerful female hero. She signs a contract, goes to bed, is hypnotised, and inside the dream she loses — robbed, stripped, raped, caged, hanged. She wakes on the same bed, still undressed, missing nothing but a few hours. What happens in the dream, only the body remembers.

 

The prologue: an innkeeper's rumour → the shop → the first dream → she asks for a longer one herself → she puts 2000 gold in and becomes a shareholder, which unlocks an on-demand menu of scripts she can pick from.

 

She is never forced into any of it. That is the whole design — she keeps choosing to go further.

 

Nothing else is explained: no mastermind, no conspiracy, no foreshadowing. And death is fake — the execution furniture only poses her and a reset routine puts her back intact, so the endings can be as hard as they need to be.

 

What's in the box right now: prologue MQ01–MQ04 plus four shareholder scripts (gang rape / broken / wolves / bear). 9 quests, ~105 dialogue nodes.

 

2. Kinks

 

hypnosis / deep hypnosis · conditioning · mind-break · consensual loss of control · being treated as inventory · public humiliation · being handled and talked over · gang rape · multi-partner rounds · involuntary physiological response · necro / corpse play · fake death · hanging · beheading · impalement · spit-roast · garotting · bestiality (wolf, bear) · petrification · limb removal · head-only state · display / exhibition of remains · betrayal by a follower · erasure of identity

 

3. SPOILER

Spoiler

NPCs will guide the player into providing various kinds of support — submitting materials, running errands — to build higher-tier hypnosis machines, instead of just sleeping. Inside those machines she experiences being completely worn out under different identities: for example, Ancano gets hold of the Eye of Magnus and hypnotises the Dragonborn — by then Arch-Mage — into his secret sex slave; the Thalmor hypnotise her and make her publicly humiliate herself and Talos, ending in a public execution; and the Dragonborn, as Thane of Whiterun, is dragged into a fraud case and has to become Nazeem's sex slave to pay off the debt. Some of the devices are sponsored by specific factions, in order to completely rewrite her cognition through brainwashing. Our heroine will sink into it — it will gradually bleed into how she behaves in the waking world — until she falls completely. (She could also break free… maybe.)

 

4. Requirements

 

Skyrim SE / AE · SKSE64 · SexLab Framework (creature animations enabled) · SexLab animation tags: MF, MMF, MMMMF, necro, vaginal, anal, wolf, bear · ZaZ Animation Pack · Pama's Deadly Furniture · Powerofthree's Papyrus Extender · Fuz Ro D-oh · FNIS / Nemesis / Pandora — and actually run the generator.

 

5. How To Start

 

Install, enable DefeatHall.esp, fully restart the game (not a save reload), preferably on a new save. Then walk up to any innkeeper and ask if anything interesting has been going on. The quest starts from there, marker and all.

 

6. Credits

 

The furniture work and the staging in this mod were learned from three authors: @Pamatronic (Pama's Deadly Furniture, PamaSovngardeAftermath), @Little White Neko (Player Death Aftermath) and @DSHV (Troubles of Heroine). Everything I know about driving execution furniture, about state-outfit presentation, and about how humiliation is sequenced across a quest chain comes out of their code and their records — without them there is no scene here at all. Every place I have used their work badly is my fault, not theirs.

 

defeathall0.0.1(test).zip

Edited 11 hours ago by moeboom

[Pamatronic]

So, What Im about to write, I really mean it in the sweetest and nicest way possible, because I'm always happy if new people get into modding, but:

Papyrus is a stupidly simple scripting language, specifically designed for people who arent actual software developers. Which means it can serve as an excellent entry point to learning coding. (matter of fact, it did so for me, and I wouldnt have my current job if I hadnt used skyrim to develop a baseline of coding knowledge).

By delegating such a basic task to ai, you are completely denying yourself the chance to ever get any meaningfull skills yourself, and his will forever hold you back.

In coding, AI is not a replacement for skill, its a stupidly powerfull supplement.
I see a lot of newbies falling into this trap, because for someone who has zero expertise, AI coding surely looks impressive, and it works well enough for simple tasks.
You stated yourself "I can't clearly point out the misconceptions in the AI's work".
And that should pretty much tell you why this approach is a complete folly to begin with. 

Seasoned creators will happily help you with issues in your OWN code if you ask, but this requires that you understand what you wrote and can pinpoint specific issues. Nobody will waste their time sifting through a bunch of AI-generated spaghetti code without any pointers. And yes, I'm including myself in "Seasoned creators".

So, my honest piece of advice for you and everyone else who wants to get started with modding:
Set up the CK, go to the creation kit wiki and look up the docs  (https://ck.uesp.net/wiki)
And write your OWN code. feel free to ask the AI to explain things to you if you dont understand something, this is useful at the start, but dont let it code for you. Make your own conscious choices and mistakes, its the only viable way to get good at this.

First mistake to point out: you didn't even include the source files in the mod, so there's precious little to look over.

[moeboom]

18 minutes ago, Pamatronic said:

First mistake to point out: you didn't even include the source files in the mod, so there's precious little to look over.

I've already replaced it. Please forgive me—I really just acted on a script in my head, and I still don't understand a lot of the basics at all.