Peu après la sortie de The Nameless Mod je suis parti interviewer quelques membres de l’équipe : Trestkon – producteur, Jonas – lead designer, NicholasVS – programmeur et Alek – ingé son. Cette interview n’est pas traduite (mod anglais intégral oblige) mais parle des features du mod, de son développement, du côté sonore (avec en plus à la fin une interview à part d’un des musiciens : Leo Badinella, qui vient de sortir un album gratuit). S’étant déroulée sur IRC, le format ressemble au final plus à une discussion qu’une vraie interview. En espérant (… fortement) qu’elle soit agréable à lire !

Interview

DukeNico – Hello everyone!
Jonas – Hello
NicholasVS – hallo
alekB_ – howdy
Trestkon – Salutations!
Jonas – Nick is one of our programmers (he did the IRC client for example), Alek is the main sound tech, Trestkon is the producer and I’m the lead designer and project director.

• DukeNico – Okay, so the first question is in my opinion THE question everybody asked… were you uninspired when you chose the mod’s name?!

Jonas – Extremely uninspired, yes! It was meant to be a working title because nobody could agree on a name… But we didn’t manage to replace it in time, and once everybody knew us as The Nameless Mod, it was too late.
NicholasVS – I’m still partial to the named mod, myself :P — I actually wasn’t around when the name was still being chosen, though we’ve lamented the choice of The Nameless Mod a few times.
alekB_ - To be honest, I think it makes the game sound a little mysterious and powerful. So strange and amazing, it has no name. It it simply is The Mod With No Name.
DukeNico – I see! Maybe you remember some of the suggestions?
Jonas – That’s just you though ;) I’m sorry I don’t remember what the original suggestions were, though I believe “Forum City” was one and “The Missing Moderator” was another. We could’ve gone with “Forum City” actually, but hindsight is always 20/20
DukeNico – Maybe The Nameless Mod, ironically, stayed into players memories…
Jonas – I wouldn’t be surprised, it IS pretty memorable.
alekB_ – I’m sure fans also thought of “The Unfinished Mod”, but we’ve sure showed them. Ha ha!

• DukeNico – Hehe yeah… About that, it’d interesting to know how you managed to complete such a huge task. Were the goals the same 7 years ago?

NicholasVS - Not even remotely: Jonas can go into details.
Jonas – No way, heheh, we just wanted to make one level originally, but then 20 people volunteered to help out, and we ended up expanding a little… So the first proper design was maybe 10 maps, but it kept growing because we had new ideas or we had to add things to make the plot work. As late as two years ago I think we added our final map in order to fix a balance problem between the two storylines.
We originally wanted it all to be one big city that you could move around in freely and backtrack right from the end back to the beginning if you wanted; but the way Deus Ex handles its game logic and its savegames, that proved unfeasible… So we decided to split the plot unto a couple of more manageable (but still fairly huge) chunks.
The thing is we didn’t start out this huge. We always had the end more or less in sight, but we just kept pushing it by adding more stuff, so it always seemed like we could get it finished in half a year!
NicholasVS – I mean initially Larry just wanted to make a map with various people from the PDX forums in it
alekB_ – If I remember correctly, it was just a little forum project in the beginning. Lots of users on the PDX forums said, “Put me in the game! I wanna be in!”. Then with the aid of lots of love and… lots of insanity, it grew. And that same love and craziness sustained the development. Eventually it grew so large that we knew there was just no way we could put it down.

• DukeNico – There must have been quite a number of persons involved… do you know how many?

Jonas - Hmm I never actually counted… I know there was never more than 20 people directly involved, not counting the voice-over artists. I would guess we’ve had maybe 50 people work on the mod itself over the years, with -if I remember correctly- just over 70 voice-over artists in addition to that.
alekB_ – Like they say in the movie trailers, “A cast of thousands.” Imagine building a skyscraper and anyone who passes by on the street can contribute with a brick or two. It’s been a gigantic community experience. But we’ve always had a main core of people keeping it going.
NicholasVS – This has led to a rather long credits screen…
Jonas - It’s endless :P
alekB_ – The Nameless Mod, The Endless Crew.

• DukeNico – So, is there anything worth knowing of PlanetDeusEx.com ? As I’ve seen there are a lot of jokes relative to the members of the community… yet you managed to let a great accessibility to the stranger player.

Jonas - Well it’s worth knowing that a lot of the factions and businesses in our mod actually started as joke-threads on those forums. That’s what kind of inspired us, but it’s the equivalent of saying “Based on a true story” because we’ve repurposed all of it to suit our needs and everything you need to know is in the actual game.
You need absolutely no prior knowledge of the community to play the mod! Furthermore, it’s no longer just about PlanetDeusEx.com… we’ve expanded it over the years to encompass people and places from a larger part of the Deus Ex community: DXEditing.com appears as a university in the mod, for example.
alekB_ – And Steve Tack, creator of the ZODIAC series, makes an appearance.
(NDLR – http://www.planetdeusex.com/zodiac/ une campagne très bien foutue)
Jonas – And finally, as much as we make references and in-jokes to the community, we make far more references to films, other games, books, magazines, well known internet communities, etc.
NicholasVS – I think in a larger sense we take this microcosm of the DX community and apply it to cover the entire idea of an internet community, complete with all the strange drama as storyline.
DukeNico - You even let the noobs in ;)

alekB_ – Of course! Noobs are a major part of the internet experience. Where would the super information highway be without a few greenhorns asking foolish questions?

• DukeNico – The idea of putting the irc channel inside the game… how did it came? Because there’s not enought people in it? To report bugs more easily?

Jonas – Because Nick felt like it to be honest :P He came across some old and disused IRC protocol code from Unreal, and decided to restore it to see if he could… Then he had me whip up a GUI for it and it went into the game, we figured it might be useful for testing (which it was, to an extent). He was pretty much just messing around, yeah – a lot of our features were implemented just because somebody had a fun idea.
alekB_ – And that’s why we’re all in this thing to begin with: To have some fun and hope others enjoy the great time we had making the game what it is.
Jonas – Personally I’m pretty happy with our epilogue: it’s a very detailed Fallout-style thing. It plays after the endgame credits, showing you the consequences of many of your minor actions throughout the game…
DukeNico – Oh wow, that must be quite entertaining to watch.
Jonas – The feedback has been pretty positive yes :P It has a crazy amount of possible combinations
alekB_ – Any major changes you make on a person or group’s life are shown. You make someone’s situation better or worse and the game will show you how important you were and what the outcome is. Everything you do has some kind of cool impact on the world.
DukeNico – Like the way you handle the “noob situation” in the beginning?
Jonas – Though it occurs to me now that that particular mission doesn’t appear in the epilogue. We should’ve totally done that :P Though, the epilogue is fully voiced just like the rest of the game… so getting that actor back in the studio is not an option at present.
alekB_ – Exactly like that, and there are multiple ways to solve that particular crisis. But many of the things you do in the game have an impact. in other RPGs, you don’t get that sense of satisfaction. Any little subplots you take on may not be mentioned in some other game’s ending. In TNM, there’s a very good chance your accomplishments will be noticed and that’s one of the things we feel proud about doing: it’s not just the concrete main plot where your decisions mattered.

• DukeNico – So we were talking about features and details. You did quite an impressive job with writing more than 200k words in various places like emails, books and discussions… How did this insane process went?

Jonas – Deus Ex had a lot of the necessary code and structure already in place, so we just improved on anything we could and made maximal use of what was there. It also kinda helped that we had one person to plan and handle all levels of the game logic (me), so there wasn’t a lot of communication issues about that part of the mod at least. And then, well… we handled it with lots and lots and lots of testing
Trestkon – Plus, when you have 6-10 people working for seven years, you can get a LOT done :)
Jonas – Well in the beginning I simply chose to put quantity before quality, so I sat down with a pretty good idea of how the plot should go, and started writing all the plot critical dialogue. My focus was to fill it all out as fast as possible, it took me about a year to write something like 80,000 words of it; then a couple of people joined to help out and drafted a bunch of the non-plot dialogue, which I would later go over for edits and then implement. And once that was done, it was just a question of slowly filling out the game with characters with interesting things to say. The farther along we got, the more I started to think about the quality of what I was writing, and the writing got slower…
A couple of years ago, Gelo joined, and being a published author, he had a lot of great feedback for the plot and the dialogue, so with his help we gave the game a good thorough plot pass and rewrote a lot of dialogue to be tighter and better
alekB_ – Yeah. Gelo rocks our socks off big time.
Jonas - The final phase of writing has been the testing, where the aim has simply been to support anything the player might think to do. So instead of writing to set up the plot or fill out the game world, I was writing to make sure the game responded logically if you tried to break it :P -which took a lot less writing than the other phases, but still quite a lot of work.
DukeNico – THAT is something more developpers should think of -like when you light off the room with a character inside, he gets grumpy! It’s a great reward for the player.
Jonas - Heheh yeah it’s a lot of fun to do little things like that! It also gets really complicated really fast though when everything the player does has to make sense
alekB_ – Or you jump over an in-game barricade in some bizarre way.
Jonas - Yep, also an actual example from the mod: one of the players on the forum was quite pleased when he stacked some crates to jump over a fence where he had no business yet, but a character on the other side confronted him with it that he wasn’t supposed to be there and asked if he’d cheated to get there :)
alekB_ – And the game also heavily rewards the player for exploration: Bonus weapons, bonus points, anything we can pull out from the ether of super cool prizes.
Jonas - Yeah we have so much optional content it’s just ludicrous: We have entire characters with little plot points attached that you’ll never find unless you spend hours exploring maps that you never even have to enter in the first place.
DukeNico – How many quests and characters, by the way?
alekB_ – Enough to drive a sane man crazy… or entertain him!
Trestkon – Wow, do we even have a count on the quest number?
alekB_ – Either way, it’s a lot.
Trestkon – There’s slightly over 200 characters.
Jonas – Uh I have a list somewhere… I think it’s in the bonus material :P
Hmm counting the missions are hard when so many of them are mutually exclusive… I’ll just go with the full count. Let’s go with 35. That seems like a fair, oh wait- let’s say 40, that’s more accurate. A lot of these are mutually exclusive though, especially the main storylines.
alekB_ – If there’s a dark little corner with… a little something more behind it, we’ll give you a pat on the head and a cookie. One of the things that players love is discovering hidden things. That sort of entertainment goes all the way back to when we were infants, playing peek-a-boo with our mothers.
Jonas - Way to go all Freud on us there, Alek.
alekB_ – Thank you!
NicholasVS – It’s grub’s version of godwin’s law!
alekB_ – But yes, we know people like to explore and we believe it’s a shame not to fill our worlds with little treats and goodies to make everyone happy. Our world is alive and full of dark, amazing secrets. Go out and be adventurers!
DukeNico - Like the easter eggs counter shown in the HUD, kind of telling you “YOU DIDNT FIND ME YOU LAZY ASS, LURK MORE”
Jonas - Those are particularly devilish, we basically don’t expect any one person to be able to find all of those without the help of the community!
alekB_ – Precisely. Did you code that one in, Nick?
NicholasVS – I worked a bit on the egg stuff — Shane actually wrote them initially, but I ended up rewriting some of the egg code because of some issues that came up
DukeNico – So how is it working? :P
Jonas – The encryption on it is a bit tricky. We can’t have people just opening their ini and fooling the game into thinking they have all the eggs, can we? ;)
alekB_ - We’ve tried to make it a challenge, but of course someone out there has a high Computer skill and will find a way eventually. ;) As long as people are enjoying themselves, that’s all we really want.

• DukeNico – Have you always had your motivation at the top? Never thought of dropping this quite insane project?

Trestkon – I don’t think we’ve ever thought of giving up. At times it seemed impossible (I remember looking at a list characters that needed voice acting and nearly fainting) but we always just kept working. We really tried to keep motivation up by releasing frequent builds of the game to the team, and we had a great community to encourage us.
DukeNico - That’s what I call dedication to a project.
Jonas – Or at least stubbornness.
Trestkon - Or insanity.
alekB_ – Love and Insanity.

• DukeNico- Let’s narrow down the subject a bit more to the HUGE feature of TNM: the sound design. How was this whole thing managed, the voice acting and the 4 hours of music? It’s quite impressive for a mod to have so much spoken dialogues.

alekB_ – Oh, man. The voice acting. The amount of work that everyone put into this area was colossal and it all paid off big time. We’ve all been working constantly on voice acting for somewhere around 3 or 4 years… Basically it all starts with the script: from there, we look for people to play certain characters -sometimes, they look for us. When we find who we need, we grab little chunks of the script and send it out to them, then we wait. Since pretty much all the voice acting done in this game is done for free, there is never any set time when we receive the voice acting. Then when we do, there’s no guarantee that it’ll sound great.
That’s where I come in: I’m the guy who has done much of the sound processing to make the average person’s recording sound a little better. And boy, with all the lines that this game has, this takes a really, really long time… I’ve had help, of course. There have been Spaic and secondary audio processing guys who gave me a hand to help lighten the load. Also, a few of our characters have been voiced by Jeremiah Costello, an awesome professional voice actor: he voices the main character Trestkon, as well as the main villain Scara B. King, and other minor characters you meet along the way. He’s been a godsend, he really has. Not only have we stumbled upon a fantastic voice actor with superior equipment, we have also gained a very good friend. Again, his presence has been a part of that whole Love and Insanity factor I mentioned earlier which has gotten us through this massive development process.
Jonas – (I wonder if “the Love and Insanity Factor” is a proper game design term…)
alekB_ – Because of him and the countless others who have contributed to the mod with their time and effort, this whole thing has been possible. Because of these people, we have somehow, through the years the sweat and the toiling, watched a gigantic list of characters become completely acted. Without the voice acting, this game would be very, very different. Not many mods have their own acting and this is another feature we are very, very proud of. It gives our game an actual -voice- and that is pretty darn cool, if I say so myself.

• DukeNico – It feels like an actual game, indeed. Any words on the music composition process?

Jonas – Well!
By the time we more or less had a complete list of maps, we took that list and made it into a list of what soundtracks we’d need, then we started looking around for composers willing to help out, and as they joined up, we listened through their portfolio and tried to get a handle on their style. Then we’d match their style to a particular level where it would fit well, for example our main composer Leo has a very warm and acoustic style usually, so he got to do the most friendly “home base”-type maps. So we’d send them a description of the level they’d been assigned to, maybe some screenshots, and let them work…
It was a lot easier when we made the switch to .ogg music early on, because far more good composers will be willing to help you if they can work in their favourite terrifyingly expensive music program than if you force them to work with a tracker.
alekB_ – Yeah. Not too many professional musicians are working with music formats that had their golden days in the age of the Amiga computer. Not as many as you’d like.
DukeNico – No tracker in the final version?
Jonas – No tracker in the final version, pure high-quality .ogg goodness.
alekB_ – But we’ve not forgotten the style that Deus Ex has with its soundtrack.
NicholasVS – As an aside, the ogg player was written by Jim, who’s a really talented guy — his code inspired me to write some of the native code for TNM, including the fix that allowed the ui to not upscale at high resolutions. A good chunk of my native code falls, unfortunately, into the ‘spoiler’ category, but the way we actually do it is quite neat.

• DukeNico – Speaking of soundtrack… a HL2 mod called Neotokyo recently released its long awaited soundtrack separately on CD and mp3 with a lot of bonus tracks. Do you have any plans about this?

alekB_ – Technically, the whole soundtrack is available in TNM’s music folder, free to listen for anyone who can listen to an OGG file :)
Jonas - Not right away but once Leo has had a breather, he’ll get around to giving our soundtracks proper endings and we’ll put it out in a format so you can burn it to a disc and listen to it in your stereo or whatever. And yes we will also put the soundtrack CD up for sale, though we still won’t be making money from it unfortunately because it’s a legal minefield.
DukeNico - Like the DVD.
alekB_ - Lawyers are scary!
DukeNico – Speaking of dvds… how many were sold? How many times was the mod downloaded within the first 24 hours?
Jonas - I can tell you that as of a couple of hours ago, the mod had been successfully downloaded a total of 328 times split between our own site and ModDB, plus (my BitTorrent client tells me) 214 times via torrent as of right now. Plus it hasn’t even been out for 24 hours yet, and we haven’t actually contacted any news sites for coverage either.
alekB_ – And we’ll be expecting quite a bit more as the word spreads :) Some of our fans are like Cthulhu, slumbering in ancient places, waiting for the right summons to awaken… Of course in a totally cool, good, awesome way that is nothing like the pure evil of something from a Lovecraft tale. We love you guys!
Trestkon – I’ve just checked the numbers, there’s been 41 DVD sales. So, nothing major, but I’s nice to give people the option :)

• DukeNico – Deus Ex runs on quite an old engine, but you are working together with high retexturing projects, how do you manage these collaborations?

NicholasVS – The HDTP support (well, the foundation for it that exists within TNM) came relatively late and was made possible by the opengl renderer that allowed eg higher resolutions textures. TNM’s support itself is done in many cases by simply embedding HDTP content into TNM (like quite a few of the weapons) though we also use some code provided by John (HDTP’s lead programmer) and myself to attempt to dynamically load the HDTP assets.
There’s one map in particular where we really exploit the ability to use high resolution textures — you’ll likely know it when you see it.
DukeNico – Though, it’s been said that it doesn’t include the HDTP demo, but can handle it with ini tweaks. Why that?
Jonas – Well that’s because we already have a pretty huge download. Most DX players can reasonably be expected to already have the HDTP download installed, so we don’t want to force them to download it again when they already have it, better to keep them seperated and just make sure our game can grab their content if it’s installed.
That way, when HDTP eventually releases the rest of their project, you can swap the demo out for the full thing and it’ll all show up in TNM as it should.
DukeNico – Same goes for New Vision?
Jonas – Exactly, but you may not even need to change your .ini for that, depending on how they set up their mod.
NicholasVS – And now I must run, good talking to you guys :)
DukeNico – Alright cya NicholasVS :) Thanks for taking your time to answer my questions!

• DukeNico – I’ve also read in a loading screen quote that someone was complaining about Deus Ex map editor’s UnrealED… the first generation Unreal ED is know for its numerous bugs. Did it bothered you a lot? (NDLR – these are the quotes : “Jonas: By the way, if UEd had been programmed by competent people, TNM would’ve been done half a year ago.” and “NVShacker: This begs the question, could Jesus code a map editor so buggy he himself could not map in it?”)

Jonas – You have no idea. Words fail to describe how many problems we’ve had with UnrealEd! Just the fact that it closes instantly if you accidentally click the program icon above the file menu where the SAVE function is… oh my god! Though we did get to use UnrealEd 2.0 for some maps: Jim (same guy with the .ogg player) hacked it so it works with Deus Ex.
alekB_ – Yet another mild miracle is that we got all the maps completed with all the problems that we’ve had.
Jonas - And no BSP bugs that I know of!
DukeNico – Actually I might have seen a few :P…
Trestkon – SILENCE!

• DukeNico – Could Trestkon tell us a bit about this bonus material? He hasn’t talked much, and Jonas already has his face on ads inside TNM :P

Jonas – Larry does too!
alekB_ – You do, Jonas? I’ve never noticed. Then again, I’ve never seen your face. You’ve always been a mysterious Wizard of Oz type. :)
Jonas - You don’t read my blog then! I post the occasional vanity shot there!
alekB_ – Larry on the other hand, I’ve seen him. We’ve taken a few pot shots on his resemblance to Matt Damon :)
Trestkon – The bonus material is basically a collection of all the interesting bits of writing, video, pictures, and other media that we’ve used to plan the mod over the last seven years. There’s some team news letters that I used to send out back in 2004 or so, there’s scribbled concept art that Jonas did for some levels, and loads of other juicy tidbits. There’s also a lot of voice acting out-takes that we’ve gathered from the many, many, MANY hours of voice acting.
alekB_ – A lot of random voice acting stuff I did when I was 15. That surprised the heck out of me. Certainly gives a bit of insight. Mainly that we’re all human beings with our own little eccentricities and mistakes.
DukeNico - so that’s like a must have for the TNM fans?
Jonas - I would hope so!

• DukeNico – Big question now: what are you guys going to do now? Work on patches? Add-ons to TNM? Other mods?

Jonas – Already working on the first patch/update.
alekB_ – Maintaining, advertising, and sitting back to have a couple frosty beverages.
Yeah, a patch is definitely priority number one right now. A game this large, you’re bound to have problems you couldn’t find in the initial testing phase. Even more so because a whole bunch of people are playing it with different computers.
Jonas – Though we’ve had shockingly few bugs so far…
Trestkon – After the aforementioned patch and drinking, we have something locked away in our underground planning vault, guarded by hydras and killer bees.
Jonas – Damn those killer bees!
Trestkon – An indie production that we’re not really talking much about right now, as we want to focus on finishing things up with TNM, first.
DukeNico – Great news, then! Looking forward to hearing more from you :)

DukeNico - The interview is coming to an end… do you guys have anything to add?
Jonas - Only that it’s gotten really hard to keep up with TNM news on the web all of a sudden.
Trestkon – Yes, I think we’ll all quite our jobs answer forum posts non-stop for the next month :p
alekB_ - We know Deus Ex has changed in the face of the constantly developing nature of video games, so we hope that we’ve done can serve as a thank you note and a goodbye letter to everything that made Deus Ex so wonderful. This is our tribute to the developers, the game, the story and the fans. If we have captured even the smallest chunk of that spirit, that fantastic quality, then I know many of us will be happy.
And we hope you can be too.
Trestkon – Alright, cool. Thanks for staying up late for us!
DukeNico – You’re welcome!  Thanks to you.
alekB_ – Yeah, thanks a bunch! Pleasure to talk with you :)
Trestkon – You’re welcome! The bill is in the mail, we charge $1 per word ;)
DukeNico – oshi-

Interview avec Leo Badinella

• DukeNico – Hello Leo, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

LeoBad – My name is Leo Badinella, I’m one of the composers who wrote music for TNM. I did it for a handful of maps, custcenes… I also did the main theme. I’m trying to remember how did I come by TNM… I think I saw a post by Trestkon on the PDX forums about how they were looking for composers for their mod. At the time I’ve only been doing music for TV commercials and my own solo stuff so this proved something new, and something that I was very interested, since I loved Deus Ex.
So I replied with an electronic track I was experimenting with at the time, and they seemed interested so I got on-board.

• DukeNico – Why don’t you tell us how did the composition of the tracks went?

LeoBad – Composing music for TNM was a lot of fun. I’d usually get assigned a map and given an in-depth description of what they thought the map needed. I would usually ask about the map’s place in the storyline and what was important about it, to get an idea of where to go with the music. Then I would open the map and run around it for some time just looking around, getting a vibe for the place. I sometimes would make a short movie of me running around to have playing on the back when I wrote the music. Then I would sit down and wrote it. Usually a small idea will grow and realize itself on it’s own so it’s more of a proccess of setting bounderies about where you want the music to take you and wether it has to be more or less ambient or it can feature melodies, and what kind.
Now, for each map you would usually have to make an additional combat track, an ending track and a conversation track. The process for these is similar except for the conversation track where I would ask Jonas to give me a summary of the conversation, its importance in the story and any additional requests he may have had.
I think that’s pretty much it about the map tracks. The custcenes where done just like writing for a film: I’d make a video of the cutscene, load it up on my sequencer and write to it. Also the cutscenes were more orchestral so the instrumentation was pretty much given.
I’d set up a hit point where I thought they should go and also talk with Jonas aboy his expectations for it and whether I was hitting important places or not so important onces. That would allow me to have priorities and options when composing -which is good.

• DukeNico – I’ve heard that you would be working on a soundtrack CD. When would it be available? What would be inside?

LeoBad – That would include selections from the map tracks, by all of us composers. I’m not sure when that will be avaliable, hopefully soon :P but it’ll be pretty fun. There’s been some talk about extending some of the tracks to make them more suitable for linear listening. I think that’s a good idea and I hope it sees the light of day.

• DukeNico – I must say I’m still impressed by the quantity of music you composers managed to produce. Aren’t you afraid of the “quantity before quality”?

LeoBad – Not at all. There was plenty of time to work on the music. At the end of the development period was the only time I felt some pressure. Also, we did this work for free but I treated it just like a paid job where there’s no justification for bad quality. After all you were being trusted with a very important part of the gaming experience.
DukeNico – That’s my opinion as well. I could take for example Unreal which has an unique soundtrack in my opinion, and helps a lot the player to immerse himself into the game. It’s just so amazing I end up listening to it quite commonly…
LeoBad – Yes, it’s often downplayed because the process of writing is kind of magical in that no one really knows exactly how the process works. But it’s pretty intense, at least for me. I usually lose track of time when I’m working, and only stop when my stomach tells me it’s been hours since I should have eaten haha!
Well, you know how you mentioned the music in Unreal? At first I thought I’d be making music just like that, only leaning more towards the electro stuff like in Deus Ex -ie: not so much guitars and epic battle tracks. Once I got inside the process, I realized that it was a lot more intuitive than setting your aims and getting there. I experimented a lot with stuff that I usually don’t allow myself to do when I’m writing for a medium where the music is not at the front. Or that I would be very careful to do. In that sense working on TNM was an awesome experience.
One of the last maps I worked on was the Space Station. And it had to be pretty ambient so I experimented with out of tune synths, and strange harmonies… It gets dense at times which is great if you an keep that subdued. I mean strange in the sense that they were not typical. But you can find examples of that in western music of course.
Overall it was very much fun. Also, after all this time I’ll be looking at my schedule and miss not having to work on something TNM related :P

• DukeNico – I see the some kind of the same ambiance as the Ghost In The Shell in your Space Station tune… Would you give some of your influences?

LeoBad - You do? That’s interesting. It isn’t intentional but of course everything affects what we do.
My influences? Sure, my biggest influence would have to be Michael Hedges, he was just amazing. After him I’d name Trevor Rabin, Steve Vai, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ennio Morriconne, John Williams, and a whole bunch of metal bands that I listened in high school.
DukeNico – Metalhead here as well ;) Do you have anything to add?
LeoBad - No I think that’s ok.
DukeNico – Well thanks for taking your time talking about you :) It’s been a great talk.
LeoBad – Thank you! It’s been fun.