Background

Before Wildlander's launch in January 2022, my team and I developed a proprietary launcher to streamline and smoothen the typically rough UX of Skyrim modpacks. The launcher is a simplified front-end for complex configuration settings that can be confusing or dangerous when exposed to players.
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Challenges and Goals

• The biggest challenge we faced was the wide variety of player hardware configurations. In particular, the launcher needed to recognize and adapt itself to the player's display resolution, or else Wildlander's HUD would malfunction.

• Less technically, the launcher—like the website—needed to connect users to community resources, and to our crowdfunding platforms.

• Ideally, the launcher would function as a framework to which additional settings could be added as development progressed. This required us to think ahead as we built, to minimize technical debt as much as possible.
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Results and Post-Mortem

In all, the Wildlander Launcher has been extremely well-received. The launcher significantly improves to the smoothness of our UX, and I believe it's been crucial in garnering the largest playerbase of any Skyrim modpack. Some lessons we learned:

• The launcher dimensions are currently absolute, which has caused accessibility issues. The text and general display is tiny on screens larger than 1080p. We are working on this, and we now emphasize scalability in all UI and UX designs.

• While the source code for the launcher is open source, many of its Wildlander-specific features have proven difficult to decouple—making it hard for other modpack creators to utilize the launcher framework for their own projects. We are a hugely collaborative community, so this has been a bummer. We are currently working to generalize the launcher, and like with scalability, we would build with generalization in mind given the opportunity to start over.
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