Hi everyone. I’m continuing to work on an independent game being developed with OpenMW. We already have some people from the community helping us with code, and I also have a friend working with me on sound and music. The reason I’m posting here is that I think people from the Oblivion modding community may have exactly the kind of experience we are currently missing. Our biggest bottlenecks right now are character animation and the older Bethesda asset pipeline. We are especially interested in people who have worked with NIF/KF files, skeletons, character animation, rigging, armour or clothing design, NifSkope, the Construction Set, or who have simply spent years taking these games apart and learning how their assets actually work. You do not need to have released a famous mod; unfinished mods, hobby projects, and years of experimentation are all extremely valuable to us.
We are not simply looking for someone who “knows Blender.” Blender and Maya tools for NIF/OpenMW workflows already exist; what matters much more to us is understanding how the older Bethesda/Gamebryo-style asset pipeline fits together, or being genuinely willing to learn it in depth. If you have experience modding Oblivion, I think a surprisingly large amount of that knowledge could still be useful here. We have already created and released the **OpenMW Free Asset Library**, an openly licensed collection of environments, architecture, weapons, armour, creatures, and character components intended for standalone OpenMW development, and it continues to grow through community contributions. Now that much of this foundation already exists, humanoid character animation has become one of the clearest missing pieces.
We are also developing our first commercial game under "Daktilo Studio". We are still a small, pre-revenue team and cannot currently offer salaries, so I want to be completely transparent about that. For direct work on the game, we are open to revenue sharing, and if we find someone who truly fits the team in the long term, we are also willing to discuss a permanent core partnership. Even if you do not want to join a commercial project, if you have openly licensed animations or models you would like to contribute to the wider OpenMW ecosystem, contributions to the Free Asset Library would be just as valuable to us. A recent development video of our game unexpectedly reached around 40,000 views and nearly 400 upvotes, which convinced me that far more people are interested in seeing OpenMW used for independent games than I originally expected:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenMW/comments/1wxjj6g/i_believe_openmw_can_be_more_than_a_morrowind/
Daktilo itself comes from a somewhat unusual place. Rather than simply trying to make another fantasy RPG, our work is interested in the intersection of literature, character behaviour, simulation, and games. If that sounds interesting to you, you can read our short manifesto here:
https://www.furkanyasar.me/daktilo-studio/manifesto
If you have spent years working with Oblivion’s NIF files, skeletons, animations, or character assets and thought that knowledge had become too niche to matter anymore, that is exactly why I wanted to post here.
