Hogwarts Legacy Third Year
I think that any Harry Potter fan still has that quiet dream of attending Hogwarts as a first-year. It was a bit of a dissapointment for many players that Hogwarts Legacy decided to start the game with a fifth-year character. While I can think of many good reasons for this decision, it felt like a missed opportunity.
Creating a mod to play as a first year would have required substantial changes. So instead I opted to see if I could change the character model to a third-year instead.
This project was more than a re-sculpt of the character model though. Clothing models had to be adjusted too, the skeleton size had to altered through LUA while the game was running, and there were many text and sound replacements that needed to be done to remove all references to fifth year.
Which isn't to suggest that it was all smooth sailing. One of the more challenging aspects was ensuring the player character's height was adjusted appropriately. This had to happen by scaling the skeleton rig at runtime, which sometimes led to interesting results...
After a bit more fiddling and some custom sculpting in Blender and painting with Substance Painter I did eventually get a half-decent character model working in the game.
I probably still have the mod somewhere in my files, but two things have stopped me from trying to publish it. Firstly, my interest in the game dropped off a cliff after finishing the main story which I thought was lackluster to say the least. I'll spare you the full rant, but it boils down to choices made in the game not mattering at all. Having worked on games, I am assuming a lack of time rather than studio incompetence here. Anyway, the second reason is that forced updates to the game were rather annoying to keep up with and since my interest had waned anyway, I never bother trying to bring the mod up to date with the latest version of the game.
With Hogwarts Legacy 2 on the horizon somewhere, and versions 2 of anything typically being significantly better than their originals, I suspect that HL 2 will prove a more fertile ground for modding. Who knows, maybe we'll actually get to play the whole seven years at Hogwarts this time, and I won't have to even bother!