Yesterday, Eidos Montreal Gameplay Director Francois Lapikas gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The panel focused on the team's reinvention of a classic series with Deus Ex: Human Revolution . Lapikas touched on a number of the team's victories and failures, highlighting several key design challenges that the team overcame during such an intimidating project.

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Lapikas began by explaining the creative core of the team. He worked alongside two other gameplay directors and reported to a creative director. But with such a small core, Lapikas and his team could influence all aspects of the project at a high level before disseminating ideas and designs to the rest of Eidos Montreal.Before the initial development of Deus Ex: Human Revolution One of the obvious pieces of reference material was the original Deus Ex, which Lapikas played carefully before Human Revolution's development. He noted that he enjoyed Deus Ex but also hated it, discussing several areas that frustrated him that he wanted to change for Human Revolution.Lapikas also shared photographs of the walls of paper lining the team's office. Almost all the major design points and pillars covered the office walls. "We could not ignore it," explained Lapikas, saying that a Word document or Excel sheet can get lost on a server, but not walls of paper. When the team set up shop in its final office, the paper walls went up first.Design documentation aside, Lapikas exclaimed that "a game has to come from the gut."Lapikas spent a good deal of time discussing the hacking section of Human Revolution, which started off as a very different system. Lapikas originally envisioned hacking as closer to "actual hacking" than the final result. The first prototype involved port selection, traffic speeds, assigning CPU cycles, multiple programs, an external map of guard locations, download times, and more. "It was so complicated, I didn't even know what I was doing," admitted Lapikas.After numerous prototypes and agonizing work, an interface artist provided Lapikas with some concept art that looked more like the final product we know now. The creative director, seeing this artwork, asked Lapikas if the hacking system could be made more visual. After all the exhausting work and re-designs, Lapikas' frustration peaked. "I was livid," he said, "I hated [that artist] for a week." But it worked. And the hacking system reached feature-complete status before any other game elements, two years before ship date.The energy system bothered Lapikas and his team in the original Deus Ex. When they began planning Human Revolution, they decided to abandon the energy system altogether. The team wanted players to have full freedom to use augmentations at will. But after play testing began, the team noticed that many players began abusing the takedown system. Without energy to govern Adam Jensen's powers, players would just execute anything and everything in sight, ignoring all the other systems in Human Revolution.The team eventually employed an energy system to force players to think about their actions and make smart decisions. This, however, led to play testers demanding more nutrient bars.The panel finally arrived at the topic of the infamous boss battles, which many players strongly disliked for a variety of reasons. Lapikas explained that the boss fights came later in development and were not prepared with the same foresight as other game systems. He even admits to not having any planning documentation for them at the onset of production.After a few moments of silence, Lapikas scanned the room of attendees and said that he didn't have a good answer for why the boss fights disappointed. He noted that play tests did flag the battles as problematic, but not overly so, and the outpouring of criticism came as a serious surprise to the team. Lapikas ended this section of the panel with a sincere apology: "I'm truly sorry about that."

At the end of his talk, Lapikas reiterated that "there is no magic recipe" in game development. "It's a lot of hard work." But he eagerly looks to the future.Lapikas' final slide included a nude photo of himself (from behind) as he looked out across a lake. Not joking!

Ryan Clements writes for IGN's PlayStation Team. You can follow him on myIGN and Twitter.