What is a MOD?

Aidan Loughran
Driving Question:
How can I increase interest in learning about the community of modding and how it can
be a potential career path?

❖ I came up with this question because I would like to have more interest in my
multiplayer game and to share my own interest about modding with others.
❖ Mods can make a game more applicable to a greater audience.
❖ Mod diversity can extend from simple utilities to things like My Little Pony
❖ My summer internship had me dealing with robots and code
Mentor
Mr Tyler, the computer specialist at our school, is my mentor for my senior project. He has
helped me understand my computers and going through computer files to help me organize
the information I had created for my mod.
Research Insights

❖ My main project claim is that modding can enhance your gaming experience.
❖ I have gained the insight that this process was originally called “Cracking” and that
this could lead to career in computer.
❖ Game companies will be very eager to hire up people with these skills.
❖ I spoke with Mr Tyler and my family’s friend Miss Amanda, about the effects and
possibilities with mods.
❖ My biggest insight from this was the devotion to finishing this has and the capabilities
that can come with this.
 Product

❖ I attempted to make a mod myself as a project product.

❖ While it initially appeared to be fine I ran into technical difficulties.
❖ This product has a connection with people who could possibly want to participate and
play together with this.
Project Execution

❖ The original thing that I was modding is called Hearts of Iron 4 a strategy game based
on the Second World War that tells events with a world map pop up events and
leaves you in charge of a variety of things needed to maintain the national effort.
❖ Modding can let you do a variety of things like turn the world into a donut or restore
Austria-Hungary twenty years after being dissolved
❖ Screenshot example on next slide.
❖ Programming language UTF-8 with BOM
 Challenges

This project challenged my ability to navigate through computer programming immensely.

There are multiple sections of a multitude of items that need to be managed. To say much is
that it was hard.

One challenge I experienced in this project was the original product would just not work. It
would be constantly crashing and giving errors for things that should not exist. There were
things in the error logs that should have not caused problems with how it was set up.

A solution I came up with and that Mr. Tyler helped me with was to try and document what
was wrong and then change things to see how that would work. Finally I came to the
conclusion to try something else and I made a new mod that would only have one thing
added at a time to make sure it works.
Takeaways

❖ I should not have chosen something that could take years to do in some months.
➢ For the size and scale I chose for this project. It was not within the parameters of time I had to
complete the idea.
❖ Have a better understanding of the requirements before setting myself on a product
that was more challenging than I had expected.
❖ Have a better plan than just to go with it.
❖ I learned that I can adapt to challenges and figure out how to achieve my goals even if
they weren’t what I had imagined initially.
Acknowledgements

❖ I’d like to thank my parents for making sure I stay on task.

❖ I would like to thank Mr Tyler for his contributions to me computing endeavours.
❖ I would also like to thank our family friend Mrs. Amanda. She helped inspire me to
create a mod for me Senior Project.