With The Nameless Mod being reviewed in PCPP#165, we thought we’d take a closer look at what went into the making of this massive Deus Ex mod.

We sat down and spoke to Producer Lawrence “Trestkon” Laxdal, Project Director Jonas Wæver, and  Programmer Shane "ThatGuy" Tapp, who are just some of the minds behind the project.

PCPP: TNM is a fan produced, third party mod that’s not out there to make money. Having said that, it certainly comes off as a product that’s received a lot of hard work and effort. Has any of your team had any professional experience in the industry?

Lawrence: Ah, I think the answer to that would be no... Actually, I believe our modeler did some work professionally.

Jonas: But not for games.

Lawrence: Right.

Shane: The main development team doesn’t have any industry experience, but a lot of the people who did a bit of work have a little bit of industry experience. I'm thinking of the guy that did a few of our sound effects,

Jonas: And Eric Reuter, one of our level designers has professional experience.

Lawrence: But the core team had no professional experience. We outsourced a few things to professionals; specifically a lot of the voice acting went to Jeremiah Costello and his T-Recs Studios. We worked with a lot of professional sound studios. this is as close as we've gotten (to industry experience)

In the course of the process, did you find it to be more or less complicated than you initially expected.

Jonas: More. [Laughs] We'd initially planned for the project to take one year. And it took seven. So I think we underestimated both how much effort it is to mod Deus Ex, and to replicate its gameplay, but also our own ambitions, and just the difficult in operating a 20 person team.

So that's seven Times longer than you expected. How on earth did you keep focused for that long? For most mods, the longer it stays in development, the less chance there is of it ever getting released. How did you overcome those sorts of obstacles?

Lawrence: One of the main advantages that we had was that we're a mod with a lot of self-referencing material. I mean, it's not something that's totally obvious to people... some of it is, but some of it’s just our own stuff- and then we gave people a chance to put some things into the mod; ideas that they came up with.

Eventually, we succumbed to feature creep, and though it extended the development of the mod, it also kept people interested, so... We've said in the past that for every hour people spend working on the actually mod material, they've kind of spent another hour working on something that was interesting to them, that they wanted to put into the mod. So that's another reason why we ended up being so large.

The game has been given a lot of attention post release. On your forums is a massive fix list for the latest patch release. How important is it to you guys to continue supporting the game post-release, and don't you ever just feel like taking a break?

Lawrence: I think it's definitely really important to us to support it. I mean, if you spend 7 years doing something, you don’t want to just release it and have a buggy product out there. It was unfortunate that it was released with so many bugs, which was a result of our fairly disorganised testing process.

Deus Ex has lasted for a long time, and it's going to last for many more years. We want to have a nice polished product out there for people to play in a couple of years, instead of just dumping something that's unfinished on everybody.

Jonas: It's a matter of pride, basically.

We didn’t know that we had all these bugs when we released. We in fact thought we’d managed to kill all the bugs. But, ah, it caught us by surprise, that it had so many glitches in it. So we’ve been working quite hard to eliminate them.

Shane: Really, more than just patching, we’re just trying to get the game to where it was supposed to be. Our first release was not really what we wanted, because there were all these bugs in it, so we’re not so much adding features as we are just getting it back to what it was supposed to be.

Jonas:... or where we thought it was...

[Laughter]

Shane: Exactly.

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