Speaking With the Devs Behind a 7-Year Game Mod Project

Gamasutra has an interview with members of Off Topic Productions, the team behind the recent completion of The Nameless Mod, a Deus Ex modification that was in development for seven years. They talk about how they stayed interested in such a lengthy, unpaid project, and also how their vision for the mod shifted over the years as a result of experience and feedback. "We estimate that we recreated everything we did during the first 2 or so years because we got better. The plot went through 4 revisions in the first year and was continually tweaked, expanded, and revised. Most of it also simply came about as we experimented with the game and the engine and grew familiar with what we could do — originally we were planning something even more open and free-form than we ended up with, but when we realized how fundamentally the game was built for a completely different type of structure, we reigned ourselves in and adjusted our design. ... Also, I don't know if you ever go back and read what you wrote 6-7 years ago, but in my experience that's a great way to embarrass yourself — I spent a lot of time rewriting old dialogue to be less embarrassing."

Comments

I've been working on a Duke Nukem Forever mod

[Anonymous Coward]

I plan to release it seven years after it's been released, which will be in... Oh damn, Slashdot comments aren't long enough to fit in the year, but it'll be a while.

7 years we've been on our own

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Moss grows fat on a rolling stone, but that's not how it used to be.

Think about this. Demolition Man was released 16 years ago. As much as I liked the movie, and as much as it remains as topical and entertaining as ever, in the meantime so many other good movies were produced that to simply focus on one good movie over the years is to miss out on everything else.

Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

Ditto

[thedrx]

Also, I don't know if you ever go back and read what you wrote 6-7 years ago, but in my experience that's a great way to embarrass yourself â" I spent a lot of time rewriting old dialogue to be less embarrassing

This is very true for me. Whenever I come back to very old code, writings, forum/newsgroup posts, emails or the like, I always can't help but feel bad. Sometimes I'll happen upon a piece of code, think to myself 'what was this idiot thinking' and then discovering it's my own code :P

It's good I guess, means I'm changing over time (here's hoping it's change for the better).

Re:Ditto

[Hurricane78]

[B]ut if you have to rewrite the project from scratch more than once, you've botched something and really ought to sit down and plan it out.

Not if it's by design. I found it to be the only way that makes sense, to work trough prototyping. Especially for games and other large projects. I define the things I want to clarify, and then build a throwaway-prototype to answer as many of them with as little work as possible. Then I repeat this process, until I am happy with it.
Over a specific project size, top-down-modeling and bottom-up-coding alone do not do it anymore. And in creative processes it's sometimes even impossible.

Re:Marathon Too

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's not just a clever name?