My name is Jakub — also known as DirtyFaced in the gaming world or Laudethaire de Sanglac on Steam. I’m a young, passionate, and experienced mod maker from Slovakia who has spent the last four years working on mods for the game Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. While I haven’t worked in a game studio yet, I’ve completed commission-based projects. My hands-on experience and deep understanding of game mechanics drive my goal of breaking into the game development industry.

My main project consists of three mods used by the largest Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord multiplayer community known as Kingdom of Bretonnia or BRE on their regularly hosted 600-player battle events (links to their steam-workshop pages below). These mods contain new playable units, weapons, maps, game mechanics and admin tools making organisation and administration of these large-scale events possible.

• BRE Core (Steam Workshop) (GitHub repository) - The core mod containing most of our custom assets and scripts. It is used together with either of the other two.
• BRE Roleplay (Steam Workshop) (GitHub repository) - Mod containing units for Warhammer universe lore-friendly battle events.
• BRE Casual (Steam Workshop) (GitHub repository) - Mod containing units and re-skins specifically made for other Bannerlord communities we play against. It is used for our most regular events.

In the Bannerlord modding scene I also:

• Was commissioned by a popular mod Burning Empires to add new factions, base-game tweaks and finding and dealing with bugs.
• Was commissioned by a famous Czech streamer RobDiesALot to create a mod used for their own hosted game events.
• Worked on a large multiplayer persistent survival-styled mod. Unfortunately this mod never got fully finished due to shortage of free time as well as a similar mod being released by a different modder. However the project had several completely custom features finished such as resource gathering, inventory management and item crafting. (GitHub repository)
• Had the opportunity to collaborate with professional game artists and developers, including artists from Sarepta Studio AS (My Child Lebensborn) and a developer from studio Vildiur.
• Helped few other multiplayer modders with creation of their own mods.

Here I will showcase my experience with individual aspects of modding/ game development.

Disclaimer

While I am, and for most of the time have been, the lead developer of the previously mentioned mods, they are all group projects. Most of the mod assets — such as 3D models, textures, maps (scenes), and animations — are created by different members of our team. My personal focus within these projects is the implementation of these assets: importing them into the game’s modding kit, configuring correct material settings, animation clip settings, cloth physics, and similar systems. In addition, I handle bug investigation and fixing, modification of base game features, and scripting of new ones.

The game provides only very limited documentation of its internal infrastructure and modding tools, which makes this work a significant challenge on its own. While I cannot create these assets entirely from scratch by myself, I do have the experience and knowledge to fix smaller issues directly at the asset-source level — for example, adding missing LODs to models or correcting minor weight-painting or UV issues.

Game mechanics

Using C# I developed and implemented a wide range of custom game mechanics — some of which are showcased below. In addition, I worked extensively with XML, using XSD to define and validate game object schemas and XSLT to transform and manage game object data efficiently.

User Interfaces and Head-Up Displays

I created my own sprite sheets and used them to build custom UI screens and HUD elements. All UI layouts are written in XML using Bannerlord’s GauntletUI system. Since Bannerlord does not provide a visual editor for GauntletUI, all UI layouts are implemented manually in XML.

HUD for spells and mana.

Custom unit and equipment selection screen.

Game assets

I imported and set up numerous assets, including 3D models and textures for weapons, character equipment, and scene objects. I configured materials with appropriate shaders and render settings, set up skeletons and animation clips from large .fbx animation banks, created custom particle emitters, setup cloth physics and briefly worked with custom sounds.

A small sample of the many assets I’ve imported and set up using the Bannerlord modding kit, with careful attention to correct animation behavior on skinned models and properly configured LODs.

One of the materials I configured using advanced settings, including custom render order and G-buffer behavior, to ensure correct rendering.

A custom character skeleton with fully configured bones, joints, IK, and collision/ragdoll capsules.

From applying vertex attributes to faces in Blender to setting up cloth simulation meshes, collider capsules, and cloth behavior settings, I implemented cloth physics for multiple 3D models, achieving smooth movement and minimal clipping.

Enviroment Design

Using the game’s modding kit, I created custom in-game environments (scenes), refined their lighting and atmosphere, built complete navigation meshes, and configured all required environment entity scripts for in-game use, with additional experience using external terrain generation tools such as World Machine.

My most recently created scenes.

I fully cover my scenes with manualy made navigation mesh.

One of my prefabs consisting of both native and custom meshes and materials created to be easily reused among many other scenes.