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PCZone ranks DeusEx #1 PC game ever.


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Whoa, you worked on Deus Ex? Sweet! What role did you have in the development?

I was one of three programmers on the original game (Chris Norden, Scott Martin, and myself), and one of the original six team members that started Ion Storm Austin (having previously been the Austin branch of Looking Glass Technologies). We had a quite a bit of influence over the design of the game, and in fact I penned the entire third act of the game in the original design doc that we used to sell the game to Ion Storm / Eidos. Of course, most of that ended up getting reworked as it was too ambitious (you actually ended up traveling to a moon base in the original design doc).

 

My responsibilities included:

 

- Designed and programmed the game's entire user interface

- Designed and programmed the conversation system

- Wrote a standalone conversation editor (ConEdit) that Sheldon Pacotti used to script and write all the dialog for the game (and there is a TON of it, as anyone who has played the game knows!)

- Programmed the Save/Load system

- Implemented several other game systems

- Wrote several of the easter eggs (such as the quotes screen and the hidden "legend" menu)

- Tons of other more minor stuff

 

It was a great project to work on, although fairly long. I would later go back to Ion to work on the PS2 version of Deus Ex, which required a great deal of work to squeeze the game into the PS2's memory footprint. The entire user-interface was redone from scratch (to support the PS2 controller instead of a keyboard/mouse combination), the renderer needed substantial changes to run at a decent framerate, and the save/load system had to be thrown out and redone (as saves on the PC are *huge* and that simply could not be done on the PS2). It was a pretty significant effort, much more so than most "ports". After the US version went gold, I then worked on all the localization for German, French, Spanish and Italian versions. That ended up being a lot of work as well given how extensive the user-interface was, to say nothing of the thousands of lines of in-game dialog.

 

For the record, I had *NOTHING* to do with the sequel, Invisible War. In fact, all three of the original programmers ultimately left after Deus Ex shipped, for various and sundry reasons.

 

..Al

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Whoa, you worked on Deus Ex? Sweet! What role did you have in the development?

I was one of three programmers on the original game (Chris Norden, Scott Martin, and myself), and one of the original six team members that started Ion Storm Austin (having previously been the Austin branch of Looking Glass Technologies). We had a quite a bit of influence over the design of the game, and in fact I penned the entire third act of the game in the original design doc that we used to sell the game to Ion Storm / Eidos. Of course, most of that ended up getting reworked as it was too ambitious (you actually ended up traveling to a moon base in the original design doc).

 

My responsibilities included:

 

- Designed and programmed the game's entire user interface

- Designed and programmed the conversation system (ConEdit)

- Wrote a standalone conversation editor that Sheldon Pacotti used to script and write all the dialog for the game (and there is a TON of it, as anyone who has played the game knows!)

- Programmed the Save/Load system

- Implemented several other game systems

- Wrote several of the easter eggs (such as the quotes screen and the hidden "legend" menu)

- Tons of other more minor stuff

 

It was a great project to work on, although fairly long. I would later go back to Ion to work on the PS2 version of Deus Ex, which required a great deal of work to squeeze the game into the PS2's memory footprint. The entire user-interface was redone from scratch (to support the PS2 controller instead of a keyboard/mouse combination), the renderer needed substantial changes to run at a decent framerate, and the save/load system had to be thrown out and redone (as saves on the PC are *huge* and that simply could not be done on the PS2). It was a pretty significant effort, much more so than most "ports". After the US version went gold, I then worked on all the localization for German, French, Spanish and Italian versions. That ended up being a lot of work as well given how extensive the user-interface was, to say nothing of the thousands of lines of in-game dialog.

 

For the record, I had *NOTHING* to do with the sequel, Invisible War. In fact, all three of the original programmers ultimately left after Deus Ex shipped, for various and sundry reasons.

 

..Al

All I can say is WOW, DeusEx is without a doubt the most amazing PC games ever. :lust:
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