I have always wanted my own radio show, so naturally, I am learning to write add-ons for a ten-year-old video game.

I may or may not write a long waffly post elsewhere about why I wanted my own radio show and how what I’m doing here scratches that same long-held itch, but this particular post is specifically intended to document my process and my progress with creating “As the World Burns” – a radio station mod for Fallout 4 – with zero prior experience.

Once I had formulated the idea of making a radio station mod for Fallout 4, I quickly firmed up my requirements. The elevator pitch would be:

It’s a radio station mod for Fallout 4, which plays a load of songs from my library and I play the part of the DJ talking in between so it sounds like a real radio station and not just a playlist on shuffle.

It sounding like a real radio station is key to me, so it needs to have little jingles for the radio station and stuff like that, and the DJ should say the name of the song sometimes, and talk about the song occasionally. Also important to me is “the lore”, or making the mod “lore-friendly”, meaning that it should be believeable in the setting of the game. If you don’t know, Fallout 4 is set in Boston in the year 2277, 200 years after a nuclear war has wiped out most of civilisation. Given the post-apocalyptic setting, how would there be a radio station, and how would it be broadcasting an English guy, playing rock music from the 20th (and early 21st) century?

I came up with a story that some guy – let’s call him Tommi – came across his grandfather’s music collection before the bombs fell, managed to convert it to the medium of the time, and played them on a pirate radio station in London in 2076. He then sent recordings of his show to his mate in Boston, where the tapes remained (somewhere – haven’t worked that detail out yet) until the player discovers them 200+ years later, and (somehow again) gets them on the air. That bit of the story I can work out later.

So, I had a setting and a character, the next thing I needed was content. I picked out a playlist of songs, dropped them in a folder, and had a bit of a think about how this would work. I also watched several very informative tutorials on YouTube about this exact subject.

I realised that since my DJ will sometimes be saying the name of the song, and talking about the song, the chat and the song should in each case comprise one sound file. There can be chat before the song, after it, or both, or perhaps neither. What I need to create is a folder of sound files that, when shuffled, sound like a radio station. With this in mind I set about writing a script. At the time of writing this post, the script is over 5,000 words and probably not even half done. If you’ve ever read any of my long waffly blog posts this will likely not surprise you.

Writing the script is going to take a long time, and inspiration doesn’t always flow like water, so I set about doing other things in the meantime. Creating mods requires Bethesda’s “Creation Kit”, which is free on Steam. Running the Creation Kit requires Fallout 4 on Steam, which is not free. Running Fallout 4 on Steam requires Windows, which I do not own (I am a 100% mac-based lifeform). These were small hurdles though, and I only mention them in case anyone else wants to follow in my heroic mod-creating footsteps.

I set up Bootcamp on macOS Catalina with an official Windows 11 install image. Windows requires activation, but it seems to give you some time to do so and you can postpone/ignore it for… some time? It hasn’t stopped working yet, at any rate. Once this was up and running I installed Steam and used some birthday money (thanks Mother-in-law) to buy Fallout 4 Game of the Year Edition on Steam for £19.99. With that installed and the Creation Kit running, I was then able to create mods. Huzzah!

Only, I have never done this before and it is confusing as all hell.

Enter stage left, hours and hours of YouTube tutorial videos.