A streamer bot embodied by a dog protagonist who endlessly wanders the roads of Skyrim. It’s a mod for Skyrim adding new in-game assets and scripted logic. I streamed this to Twitch and YouTube for friends a few times.

Source code on GitHub

How the mod works

The mod adds custom waypoints at all major road junctions around the Skyrim world map. Each waypoint has a script with adjacent roads that the dog might choose to travel along next. The dog AI package handles automatic pathfinding and movement between waypoints.

The trickiest part was making the camera follow a NPC instead of the player actor. Papyrus has a builtin call to change the camera target to a new actor, so this was easy.

But when the dog travelled far from the player actor (which stayed stationary), the world would start switching to lower LODs and actors or the landscape would start disappearing. I figured out that the engine always uses the player character as the reference point for LODs and occlusion culling. My hacky fix was to make the player actor invisible and teleport it somewhere near the dog every 10 seconds!

Concept

During lockdown, I picked Skyrim back up and found a lot of peace playing through the game again. Exploring Skyrim’s vast world gave me a feeling of freedom and sense of place that was missing in real life. I loved wandering the roads and discovering new wild areas I’d never seen before.

This project aimed to capture that feeling of virtual wanderlust, but as an automatic stream that I could turn on in the background.

It’s also fun watching a cute, anthropomorphic NPC protagonist wander instead of one of the usual human playable characters. What do the dogs of Skyrim do when you’re not around? Maybe they just wander.