After creating a few small mods for Conan Exiles and falling in love with Unreal Engine 4, I formed a team to make a larger, more ambitious mod: Emberlight. The thesis behind Emberlight was to create a suite of highly interactive features for players to enjoy, while keeping the overall balance of the game in mind. To that end, Emberlight is full of in-game objects and decorations with tangible gameplay effects, such as pens for livestock, gardens for growing herbs, and new weapons tied to the lore of the game world.

We took a sympathetic design approach when implementing features, utilizing existing in-game settings, statistics (such as crafting speed, material harvest rates, etc.) and visual assets wherever possible. Even Emberlight’s user interface is meant to compliment rather than contrast with the base game’s.

Despite going on to create more technically advanced and powerful mods, Emberlight remains the most-downloaded of my mod projects, with nearly 700,000 unique subscribers since it was published in May of 2018.