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Interview mit Corylea über Modding in The Witcher
Interview with Cory "Corylea" Kerens from Boston, Massachusetts, Corylea is working on her first Witcher Adventure "Medical Problems". In the interview she talks to The-Witcher.de about her modding passion, women in "a man's world of gamers and modders" and how modding changed her life.
The-Witcher.de: How did you get into modding with the D'jinni editor?
Corylea: I read the forum posts at  TheWitcher.com of the people who were making mods for the modding contest, and although they were frequently frustrated with D'jinni, it seemed as if they were also having a lot of fun, and I wanted to play, too. (Not for the contest, which was already well underway by that time; I just wanted to make something.) I thought, "How hard can it be?"
The-Witcher.de: I remember many people complaining about D'jinni, saying that it's too complicated and some things don't work. Did you have the same difficulties?
Corylea: Yes and no. When I started with D'Jinni a few community members were already all pioneers in using D'jinni. When D'jinni was released, it had essentially NO documentation, and some of the simplest things were complete mysteries. Arkray, the Strands of Destiny team and Bonssaaay of the Ifrit team were extremely generous in sharing what they'd figured out with the modders who came after them. The contest participants were wonderful in that they helped one another as least as much as they competed with one another, and if one of them figured something out, they shared it with everybody. So by the time I started modding, the basics had been figured out. There was still plenty to figure out, and I figured out a few of them myself, but there was considerably more D'jinni knowledge available to newcomers just a few months after the contest started than there had been before. Bonssaaay, of the Ifrit team, has done a lot of work on the D'jinni wiki, to document all of this.
As for the D'jinni Adventure Editor itself, it's true that there are some things that don't work. For example, one can't add certain objects to a scene in the cutscene editor. You're supposed to be able to do so, there's a menu for that, but that part is just broken. Some things just don't work. An example of this is the quest editor, which is mostly very nice but occasionally becomes flaky. Initially my first quests I ever made just didn't work until I made them working.
To use D'jinni, it helps to be very, very stubborn and not give up when things go wrong, yet it also helps to be rather flexible, to be able to find a new way of doing something if a way that should work just doesn't, for no apparent reason.
 On the other hand, I have a lot of praise for D'jinni, too. It is a very powerful and flexible tool; almost anything you can think of doing, you can get done using D'jinni. The quest editor is a very powerful and flexible tool; it has so many options that I think we've only scratched the surface of what kinds of quests it's possible to make using it. And the conversations editor is also a great tool with a lot of possibilities; it's my imagination and creativity that limit how good my game will be, not D'jinni.
The-Witcher.de: Do you have experience with other modding editors as well? If yes, which one and did you make an adventure with this editor?
Corylea: I haven't made any new adventures for RPG's, even though I've played a lot of them, but I've made some things for "The Sims 2". Most of those were just simple recolors, but I also made a new career, which involves the kind of getting one's hands dirty with the innards of the game that D'jinni requires. One of my creator pages for "The Sims 2" is here. More than 12,000 people have downloaded my "Sims 2" mods, and I love knowing that there are thousands of people who are enjoying their games just a little bit more because of something I made. Once you get a taste of that, it's hard to stop. Of course, much as I enjoy "The Sims", "The Witcher" is my favorite game of all!
The-Witcher.de: There are only a few female modders, the majority are young males. What is your opinion of that?
Corylea: While this is certainly true for "The Witcher", I started modding with "The Sims 2", and there are a LOT of female modders for that game, so modding never seemed like a boys only thing to me. And female modders for the "Sims 2" aren't just making stereotypically feminine mods, like new clothes -- some of our best modders for working with the deepest innards of the game are women. So instead of thinking of myself as unusual, I think it's strange that there aren't more women modding this game, especially since I know that "The Witcher" has a substantial female fan base.
So tell your women Witcher community members that they can mod "The Witcher" if they want to. I've been a psychology professor and a therapist, both of which are pretty far from the programming trade, so people needn't think that they have to be serious programmers to mod "The Witcher". I find that the "Neverwinter Nights" scripting language (which is what "The Witcher" uses) is quite simple and straightforward -- if you can think logically, but that's not a very high bar to jump. You can learn to use it! And most of modding "The Witcher " is not about writing scripts; it's about creating quests, writing conversations, and decorating areas. The tools for doing those things do require a little getting used to.
The-Witcher.de: What do your friends think about your hobby?
Corylea: Nearly all of my friends love games, but most of them are so very busy that they have very little time to play any, much less mod any. So most of my friends think it's great that I'm doing this, even though they haven't played The Witcher. Several have promised me that they'll play "The Witcher" someday, and I think when my adventure comes out, that will increase the pressure on my friends to play the game ... I hope CDPR sells several more copies that way.
The majority of my friends work with computers in some way, as programmers or sys admins or even as researchers into basic Computer Science. I also have one friend who's a professional writer -- she's published sixteen science fiction novels and also teaches Creative Writing at the university level -- another friend who writes poetry for a hobby, and several who write fan fiction and/or erotica. Both computer skills and writing skills are well represented in my friendship network, so I occasionally have wistful thoughts about what a great modding team my friends would make if I could put all of them together!
The-Witcher.de: How much time do you spend with modding? Is there enough time left for your job and family?
Corylea: I had to close my therapy practice several years ago, due to illness, so I'm unemployed at present. My health is still iffy, so there are days when I can work on my new adventure and days when I can't. On days when I can work on it, I've spent as little as two hours or as many as sixteen hours working on it in a given day; there are days when my husband has to remind me to eat!
My husband and I have no children, and he has a very demanding job as a professor, so I don't have many responsibilities right now, and I have a lot of time to fill while my husband is working. Working on my mod can fill as much time as my health allows; when I'm having a good week, healthwise, I put in as many hours on my mod as most people put in at their jobs. Although it's not paid work, working on the mod is my work at the moment -- it's the thing I do that adds meaning to my life and the thing I do that I hope will benefit other people at least as much as it does me.
Luckily, my husband is wonderfully interested in and supportive of my mod without knowing anything about how I'm actually doing what I'm doing. He enjoys hearing me babble excitedly about my latest idea or my latest D'jinni work-around. He's so busy that he's only ever played The Witcher up until the autopsy in Act II, but at least that's enough to know who Geralt is and a little bit about what Sapkowski's world is like and some basic things like that.
The-Witcher.de: Do you have like-minded friends with whom you can discuss the matter or even share a successful modding phase?
Corylea: Sadly, I don't have any friends who are modding "The Witcher" or any other game, and that's probably my biggest complaint. Modding absorbs so much of my time and attention that I wish there were someone to talk about it with. The Polish boys are very sweet, and we sometimes exchange a word or two, but the language barrier can get in the way. I'm also very aware of being twice their age, and female, so I'm a bit afraid of annoying them. Seems that quite a number of male gamers and modders are wary of women's competence and capability. I really wish that Hexenmeister Raven and Nimue hadn't departed from "The Witcher" modding community for "Dragon Age: Origins"; I really like both of them.
The-Witcher.de: Maybe you can join the IFRIT Creative Group? The poeple are very ambitious and create many extras for an adventure like trailers, artworks and concept arts. They co-operate with professional musicians who compose the soundtrack. They did for 'Merry Witchmas' and want to continue the co-operation with them. IFRIT also has engaged translators who translate the adventure into other languages.
Corylea: I haven't been asked to join IFRIT, and I would never be so presumptuous as to put myself forward as a candidate for membership. And even if they decided to ask me to join them someday, I wouldn't expect them to do so now. They don't really have any idea of what I can and can't do; they'll have a better idea once the first chapter of my adventure is finished. If I were them, I'd wait to play it and evaluate me then.
Besides, I really do want to finish the adventure I'm working on now: "Medical Problems". The first chapter of it is getting close to finished; I have maybe a month's worth of work left on that. But the second chapter isn't even started yet, and it will take me many months to produce "Medical Problems: Chapter Two".
It's also true that I worked with a group once in the past and had a very negative experience with them, an experience that ended in my feeling betrayed and taken advantage of. I think working on my own for a few months, to get the taste of that experience out of my mouth, is the right thing for me at the moment.
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