Devlog - August 2025 - Stonebark Brewery: Crafting the Ales
- mattlsutton1993
- Aug 14
- 7 min read
Introduction
Hey everyone! It's Altire here again to bring you the second part of our Stonebark Brewery devlog.
In part one, I gave a brief introduction into my background and my role within the Lordbound team. We then explored the history and lore of Stonebark Brewery, before taking a closer look at some of their Ales and Brews.
If you haven't already done so I'd highly recommend reading part one first, as I'll be picking up right where I left off and diving straight into the asset creation workflow. This will give you a more technical insight into exactly how these assets are made.
We’ll be focusing on the Stonebark Ruby Ale today, using it as a case study as we work through the full asset pipeline.
Let's get started!
The Creation Workflow: An Overview
To create assets for the Lordbound mod (or really any game!), we typically follow a workflow that consists of several key stages. It's through these stages that we take an asset from a simple idea to a weapon, potion or piece of armor that you can see and interact with in the game.
While these stages are usually always required, the extent to which each one manifests itself can vary greatly depending on several factors. The scope and complexity of the asset, for example, will have a significant impact.
A static object like a building is far easier to create and implement than a new potion, or a door that the player can open and close. The exact steps taken for each stage are also often highly specific to each developer, as well as their chosen tools.
Today however, we'll focus on the workflow that I personally used to create some of the Stonebark Ales and Brews covered in the previous Devlog. Let’s take a second to look at the stages of this workflow before we proceed:
Iteration, Refinement, and Embracing Change
While these stages are usually followed in the order specified above, there’s something critical to be aware of that will sound all too familiar to any Software Developers that might be reading. The Asset Creation workflow is not a Waterfall-based process! Instead, we take a more Agile approach.
If this sounds like a foreign language to you, then don’t worry. This simply means that we don’t proceed through each stage, never to return. Instead, we’ll often repeat the entire workflow cycle several times, or revisit specific stages until we’ve reached the desired end result.
We take this approach because requirements can, and often do, change at any moment, and new ideas may surface during the creation process. For example, while implementing our asset into the game, we may decide that new geometry should be added, or that textures need to be adjusted. Consequently, whatever our workflow may be, it should be flexible enough to allow for change.
With that out of the way, let’s get back to the workflow itself! We won't have time to cover the stages in great detail, but we will touch upon each to give you an idea of exactly what they involve.
Stage 1: Planning and Design
Before we can start to build anything, we of course need to know what it is that we want to create.
This stage will consist of:
An initial idea or requirement
Reference gathering
Concept art
For our idea/requirement, we know that we’re looking to create one of the brewery’s higher-end ale assets, the Stonebark Ruby Ale, which is consumed by the wealthier and more prestigious citizens of the Druadach Valley. This gives us a good starting point, so now it’s time for some fun!
Using a variety of search engines and online resources like Google and Pinterest, I’ll collect relevant images and build out a reference board to work from within PureRef, which is an excellent tool for exactly this purpose.
This is where some knowledge of the domain at hand also proves useful. Fortunately, I just so happen to be a fan of beer myself! As someone who lives in England’s Peak District National Park, there’s no shortage of inspiration from the breweries and traditional English pubs that break up the green rolling hills of the countryside.
That said, I’ll certainly be taking inspiration from the ever-expanding array of popular beers and ales produced by breweries all over the world. Eventually, I’ll end up with a reference board I can work from. We’ll then want to identify specific areas or features that we find interesting, and that are relevant to the asset we’re trying to create.
This is a good time to think about the effect our ale will have on the player, and the influence and impact this may have on our design. We’ll talk about this more in the prototyping stage.
Looking more closely at the reference board, I think I like the distinctive shape of Orval, which is a popular trappist beer produced at the Orval Abbey in Belgium. Also of interest is Tynt Meadow, another trappist beer which is brewed at the Mount St Bernard Abbey in England.
For Stonebark’s Ruby Ale, I think Orval is going to be the winner here. Don’t worry though, The Tynt Meadow bottle later becomes the inspiration of choice for the Stonebark Dark Ale!
As Concept Art isn’t one of my strengths and I’m much faster in a 3D modeling program than I am with pencil and paper, I’ll instead skip this step and perform conceptualization as part of the prototyping stage coming up next.
Stage 2: Prototyping
The prototyping stage is about developing our ideas and turning them into something more tangible that we can develop further.
At this point it’s essential that we think about the effect of our ale. Why? Well, if we model and texture the asset around a specific effect, we don’t want to reach the implementation stage to discover that this effect can’t be created! This will inevitably result in costly redesign, which we’ll want to minimize.
This becomes more important when creating a Brew with advanced effects, compared to an ale with a simple stat change. So, if it is a Brew that we’re looking to create, we’ll want to prototype and validate the effect within the Skyrim Creation Kit (CK) first, before proceeding with design.
For the Stonebark Ruby Ale however, we’ll keep the effects relatively simple and skip the CK effect prototyping. This is an Ale after all, and not a Brew, so let’s get to work on creating some prototypes!
This is where we fire up our 3D modeling application and begin experimenting with simple shapes and designs. At the end of the prototyping stage, we’re looking to have a collection of primitive assets that we can choose from to develop further.
Stage 3: Modeling
Although we’ve already done some initial modeling, this is where we really begin to develop our asset.
Continuing within Blender, our 3D modeling software, we’ll begin to add features and detail to our chosen design to make it more interesting and intriguing. We’ll want to focus on maintaining good, clean topology, and keeping our asset’s poly count low to optimise performance within the mod.
Once we’ve reached a point where we’re happy with the design of our asset, we can export it to an FBX file that we’ll then import into our texturing application in the next stage.
Stage 4: Texturing
It’s now time to bring our ale to life with some materials! Using a texturing application we’ll give the asset color, reflections, and surface details like grime, dirt and scratches.
My tool of choice for this stage of the workflow is Adobe Substance Painter, where I’ll be experimenting with various styles until I find something that I think works well. Here I’ll first texture the glass and metallic elements of the bottle, before moving onto the liquid inside.
Once we're satisfied with the materials we've created, we'll export them as a collection of PNG image files before converting those into the DDS file format that Skyrim can read.
Stage 5: Implementation
Model? Check. Materials? Check. What’s next? It’s time to get our asset into the mod of course! This is where the Implementation stage comes in.
Implementation is a crucial stage that’s often overlooked or underestimated by those that are just getting their feet wet in the world of 3D game asset creation. I know I was certainly guilty here!
At a high level, we’ll need to address the following areas as part of this stage:
Collision and physics
Texture assignment and setup
Importing into the game engine
Integration within the game world/levels
Testing within the game
Packaging and build submission
The level of involvement that a 3D Artist may have in this stage is going to be heavily dependent on the size of the team you’re working with. You may find that you’re responsible for several or even all of these stages, or you may simply pass your exported model and textures to a Technical Artist who takes care of the work for you.
For this particular asset however, I’ll be taking on both of these roles and performing all of these tasks myself.
We begin by using Blender to create a simple and less geometrically dense version of our ale, which will act as its collision mesh. We’ll then utilize a tool called ChunkMerge within NifUtilsSuite to set up this mesh as our asset’s collision.
Next we’ll open our asset in NifSkope, a tool for working with the NIF file format that Skyrim uses for game assets and objects, like buildings, weapons and armor. From here we assign the exported textures, and also set up the asset’s collision properties.
It’s now time to bring the asset into the mod using the Skyrim Creation Kit. From here we create and assign a magical effect to our ale, before adding it to levels, containers and inventories.
We’re close to the finish line now! Let’s finally launch Skyrim and begin play testing our asset! The aim here is to make sure that our ale looks and behaves as expected.
Perfect! The ale looks exactly as we expected it to and its collision is working nicely. We’ve finally reached the point where we can submit it to our build master. It’s their job to then merge our asset into the latest version of Lordbound so that the player can get their hands on it once the mod releases.
Final Words
And that’s it folks! It’s time to bring our two-part series on Stonebark Brewery to a close. Thanks for joining me on this whistle-stop tour.
There was barely time to scratch the surface, but I truly hope this has proven interesting and insightful, and that it’s piqued your excitement for the mod which is less than two months away.
We’re in the home stretch now, but this also means that we need all the help we can get to push Lordbound over the finish line. Do you have skills in the following and think you could hit the ground running:
Level design, mostly city interiors
Audio editing for VA submissions
QA/playtesting and bug fixing
If so, we’d love to hear from you! Check out our Volunteer page to apply.
In the meantime, remember to tune in to Creation Mod Con 2025 at the end of August, where we’ll be showcasing some of what Lordbound has to offer. Otherwise, we can’t wait to see you in the Druadach Valley in September!
– Altire
