What follows is a series of commentaries on the development of that most excellent Oblivion mod, AFK_Weye, started between November of 2011, continued in 2013, and finished in early 2019, in honor of AFK_Weye’s 10th anniversary. They run to over 50 pages and over 160 images, which is enormous and possibly overly self-indulgent. At this late date I’m not sure the reasoning I give in my original intro is still valid to anyone, but at the very least these posts will serve as a record for me.

Below is my original introduction from 2011:

I spent, as of November 2011, fully five and a half years on AFK_Weye. Given that, I think it a worthwhile project to create a sort of developer commentary on the mod. We’re well into the Skyrim age now, of course, but I think it’s worth going back and examining what was done before – the things I want to say here aren’t really specific to Oblivion, or even TES modding in general.

There are a few reasons for this. The first and most obvious is to simply have a record of what I did during creation, since as time goes on I forget more and more of the details. So there’s a selfish reason for the thing.

Second, however, and I think more important, is that a detailed commentary can hopefully serve to help mod authors, would-be mod authors, and players. For the latter two groups, I tend to think that mod creation tends to be something of a mystifying process, and they look at established mods like AFK_Weye 2.32 and think that it sprang forth like Athena, fully-formed from the creator’s head, and with that comes the natural follow-on thought that “I could never do that!” Or that they look at the Construction Set and think “This is way too hard!” and give up. I think these tend to be misperceptions, and I’d like to shine some light on things.

Having said all of that, I want to start by giving a chronological look at AFK_Weye, from its beginnings in 2006 to the latest patches in 2011 and what I was thinking and trying to accomplish every step of the way. Later, I want to dissect the individual quests, discussing why I made the choices I did and where I was going with each one. Hopefully, I can also pass along the odd entertaining story or two.

This post will ultimately contain links to all the parts for everyone’s convenience.

History, Part 1

History, Part 2

Main Quest, Part 1

Weye Manor

Main Quest, Part 2

Main Quest, Part 3

Kerrach

Side Quests

Epilogue