M:What inspired this project? What made you think I want to do a FPS of Knights of The Old Republic?

T: Well...just to clarify, most of the screenshots that have been released are in first person because we want to show off the environment. If you check out the livestreams that we do we have the code and functionality to switch back and forth between both first and third (perspective) and were just gonna give the player the option to go back and forth. As I had a person tweet at me a while back "is it only first person or third person...or can we Skyrim it?" and I love that term. Yes you can Skyrim it.

M: Okay! Good to know! (shamefully bows his head for his ignorance.) Back to the original question. How did this whole thing get started?

T: It's a little bit of a lengthy story, but it all kind of started back in 2012 is when The Old Republic came out. At that time I was taking a job offer in China so I was moving abroad...and I had about a month between jobs in order to play The Old Republic. Before it came out everyone was saying...well I think even THEY were saying in a press release "This is KOTOR 3,4,5 and 6." Of course that made me really excited. I was like "this is going to be the best thing ever!"

So I got the game, and I've said this before, but it was a really ambitious project. It was really fun, and I enjoyed the game...I played it every day before I left to go to China, but it still felt like it was an MMO. It didn't feel like that nostalgic feel of KOTOR. That's something that really bummed me out I was excited as that game as it had a ton of potential. For the time of it's release (2003) that game had a lot of innovative storytelling...

But it wasn't KOTOR. So it came down to who's going to do it? The major opinion (of the gaming community) was they're ding the MMO...KOTOR 3 will probably be later on...and KOTOR 3 never happened.

So what happened was I tried to play The Old Republic in China, and it was blocked by the Chinese government...I still had KOTOR on my original laptop, so I was able to get my fix playing that again, and again, and again. It kind of got to the point I felt that someone had to step up and do it (make a KOTOR successor) and that person WAS NOT me! Of course, as more time went by and no one was even discussing a successor or reboot...I was in Hong Kong and thought "what if I did that? I could make a game I know computers!" In my head it felt like something out of Andy Griffith like "I'm gonna make a video game!" It's all gonna work and it's all gonna be easy and little did I know the undertaking it would be.

This was all before Unreal Engine 4 came out...when I got back to America in 2013. I still had the idea in my head but I didn't have a way of going about it. If I actually knew the complexity and workload making a game entailed I would have given up right then...but I had my new laptop and was back in the states so I said "I'm gonna make this game."

I was using Cryengine 3, because back then it was free, and I could run it on my laptop...I also had a 3DS Max student version from when I was in grad school. So I went and kind of just made basic levels, like that...I just kept trying to recreate what I saw in the game on my screen and it was going miserably. It was just something I was doing in my spare time...nothing serious you know...just to have fun.