[PlanetDeusEx] How is the team size right now? Are you pretty happy with who's part of Edge of Dark now, or do you plan on continuing to recruit people?

[Shade01] The team size right now is pretty good. I feel pretty fortunate to have such high level designers and artists working with me on this mod. Turnover for our mod is pretty low, so the team is really starting to gel and develop some chemistry. There is some awesome work going on that I can't reveal just yet. As always, I will take a look at anyone who applies, but I'm pretty picky If you've noticed, I've never emailed any of the sites that cover dx mods to request members and then sit around and hope someone applies. I have gone outside of the dx community and personally recruited about half the team. I have some exceptional artists that I found, and an incredible mapper I found from the UT community. If I feel like I need a particular type of team member, I will go out and get that person. In order to approach a total stranger and ask them if they want to work for free, professionalism of the team and the project is always stressed, and it remains as such.

[PlanetDeusEx] There seem to be quite a few people working on the project who've had professional game or movie development experience. Could you give us a rundown of who's done what, their motivations in working on a community mod, and how you think that their experience will help or hinder?

[Shade01] Me myself, I did some work for Sega for a game called TenSix. Roman, another of our artists, did some work for Capcom for some Final Fight games. I am also very fortunate to have the resource of Mary Miller, who has done some work on the movies Titan AE, Anastasia, and Tron. Our advantage is that we understand the process of what's involved in making a game and seeing it through to completion a bit more than a lot of other mods. What's our motivation? Making games is fun, period. I've been a game junky since the Atari 2600. Seeing something that begins as an idea that translates into a 3d world that other people can enjoy is the ultimate. I love to tell stories, and any medium I can get my hands on that will allow me to tell a story, I'll run with it.

[PlanetDeusEx] Map-creation: what's the process? Do you make concept art, design docs, or suchlike? Or do your mappers just pull it out of their imaginations, following general guidelines? Or do you strike a balance?

[Shade01] There is a master design doc that everybody draws from. Our doc details what the levels are, how they play, and what they look like among other things. Then we break it down to specifics of puzzles, areas, flow of the levels, and item placement. There is additional concept design for each map. After the architecture of the map is completed, our texture artists go to work. For one of our maps, we have created over 40 new textures. After that, it's all about item placement, implementing the puzzle design, story and working out the kinks. I do try to keep it fun for everyone, so I'm very open to ideas and we always toss some about before we start mapping. There is some leeway with the mappers as far as how some things look. I'm really cognizant of the fact that a lot of people join mods in an effort to break into the videogame industry, so I try to make sure each artist and mapper shines so they look as attractive as possible to any potential employer.

[PlanetDeusEx] UnrealX editing is simplified in many ways by great tools such as UnrealEd,and Deus Ex adds in the supremely powerful ConEdit. But are there any aspects to building assets that are particularly problematic?

[Shade01] I'm used to building in traditional 3d packages like Lightwave and StudioMax, so sometimes to me using UnrealEd feels like trying to perform a surgical operation with a spoon. The placement of objects and their interaction with each other isn't as precise as i'd like but you learn to work around it. I think what frustrates me the most is that the graphics are behind the technological curve a little bit. Honestly my mappers are better at using the Unreal editor than I am. I did figure out how to get UED2 to work with Deus Ex so that helped. You want to try something strange? Play a UT assault map as JC Denton. It's just plain weird.

[PlanetDeusEx] What was your most prominate source of Ideas and inspiration for the mod, besides (obviously) Deus Ex?

[Shade01] I was into conspiracy stuff anyway, so I always thought that a game like Deus Ex would be good. Most of my ideas just come from thinking a lot about what I'd want to play. I lay around in my hammock all day, overlooking a crystal blue ocean sipping iced tea just thinking about ideas and how all the parts fit together. Ok, maybe I don't REALLY lay around in a hammock all day, and the water around here is closer to a dark industrial waste green color but I do think up stuff all day. Also, a lot of my inspiration comes from my team, they think of things I probably would never have thought of, and see things from different angles.

[PlanetDeusEx] The site hints at 'emotion cloning' being an issue central to the conflict between the big organizations in this project. What exactly is emotion cloning, and why are people dying because of it?

[Shade01] How could you know you are truly yourself if you knew that at any moment, someone could change the way you think? Emotion cloning is everywhere around you. What makes a person with no prior arrests kill? Why does a normal, well adjusted person suddenly become a serial killer? Why is it that listening to certain songs make you feel a certain way? How can you say for sure that emotion cloning isn't being used all around you? To be able to control the mass of the populace and assume no responsibility for anything that happens in society is extremely powerful, and people will kill to get it and kill to keep it. Emotion cloning is actually just a part of a much more diabolical plot, and not the main focus of the story.

[PlanetDeusEx] Your design page seems to indicate that you will play different characters throughout the game. Is this a correct assumption, and could you elaborate on how this will work?

[Shade01] Well ok, I'm busted. The website hasn't been updated in awhile because we're much more interested in working on the mod, but that has changed, and you play the game as one, at most two characters.

[PlanetDeusEx] Where does JC, mentioned in the very last sentence on the same page,fit into all this?

[Shade01] Damn, busted again actually, JC will not be in the game. The original plan was to have JC in it, but the world is so stylized and far from Deus Ex, that he didn't really fit in, so we decided not to use him. The amount of work going into the mod pretty much makes this a total conversion.

[PlanetDeusEx] Multiple player characters makes it a bit hard to create empathy for any one of them. How do you plan to work around this?

[Shade01] If you keep the story tight and a few main characters involved, that problem shouldn't be an issue. You'll always be in contact with a few central characters and if you switch to another character, that character will remain with you as an NPC to help you and advance the story.

[PlanetDeusEx] There's a chance that you actually offend/anger somebody by examining one particular government too closely--not to mention causing genuine concern in said government if your fiction is too close to the truth. What steps have you taken to avoid that, if any?

[Shade01] There is an actual patent on file for an emotion cloning device, and the fact that I'm using emotion cloning in the way I'm describing it has already attracted the eye of the military. I kid you not, shortly after I conceived the mod and put up a webpage last year, I got three emails from a military base in Alaska expressing *deep* interest in the mod. I had DSL at the time, so my connection was constantly on, and right around the time I got those emails, I began to get a lot of 'probings' into my computer, and my upload/download light was constantly flickering and my hard drive would spin pretty vigorously. I had to disconnect my DSL a few times. I'm pretty damn sure the emails and the probings are related. I want everyone out there to know that after this mod is released, if you never hear from me again... I was probably closer to the truth than they would like.

[PlanetDeusEx] In your weapons concepts, there seems to be a bent towards large,seemingly undefeatable foes. Can we expect to see a large percentage of combat situations in which the object is to outsmart rather than outgun the enemy?

[Shade01] You are an average guy in an extraordinary situation. You will face well funded, well trained, VERY well armed people throughout the game, and sometimes it will look hopeless. You will almost never have the superior firepower. You cannot tackle every enemy in this game with a bullet. There will be some instances where you can take them head on, and sometimes you will need to manipulate the environment to gain the upper hand. There will also be times where your best option is to run like hell.