Disco Elysium Pre-Release Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Prime Junta]

^
Typical July day at these latitudes.

 

[Kasparov]

Oh hi there! It has been a while, hasn´t it? Summer season - Prime Junta called it. Lots of minor-major things have happened during our devblog silence. I see you saw the snow tech. Siim - our "weather man" - he´s a real rainmaker, that one! And yes, we´re looking for voice talent as well. Hit up Mikee Goodman if you think you have what it takes to voice a character in No Truce With the Furies and can make it to UK for auditions. On the game front all the areas are in the game now (in the Unity editor, to be exact) - which is pretty cool. They´re far from complete - lots of testing and aesthetic tweaks to do before they´re done, but we´re getting there. The marketing team is prepping for Gamescom in Köln - that´s going down in August and we should have another playable build there. Check or twitter feed for flash updates: https://twitter.com/studioZAUM

I was away for a whole month recharging my batteries. Saw a whole new continent and everything that´s there. Cool beans. More updates and some interviews coming soonish. Could be that there will be more regular updates from now on. Could be...

This blog entry by yours truly.

"THE GOOD KIND OF DOWNTIME"

Hello, blog reader! It is summertime, so this post is also summer themed and more personal than the average posts on our developer blog. It’s been a while so I’ll begin by re-introducing myself. I’m Kaspar Tamsalu and I’m an artist here at ZA/UM. I work on concept art and level design. I may also concept the occasional character. For me working on a larger (hence longer) project like No Truce With the Furies is very inspiring and the teamwork can be rewarding as hell. It can also get out of hand and become extremely tiring if I’m not being careful. Seemingly without notice a year flew by with no serious breaks in between when I could have taken my mind off the streets of Revachol or the beaches of Martinaise.

We’re constantly trying out new things, learning new programs or techniques and our art team bites through a lot of new material. The problem is, we haven’t given any of it time to set. Actually I noticed this already way back when I was a student in the art academy. We’d cram our heads with tons of information and practice without break for months at a time, but at some point I always hit a glass ceiling. Then for the longest weeks the progress was excruciatingly slow or ground to a full stop. The clarity and energy returned only after the summer break. So – when faced with deadlines and pressures of the everyday, it’s just so easy to forget that all work and no play makes Jack a dull-ass boy. I had to get out!

So, this May I found the resolve to decide that I need some actual me time away from the stylus and screen and do some traveling and see new things and most importantly: to try and get my mind off of work. I mostly succeeded. It was tough in the beginning, because all the unfinished concepts would haunt me in my jet laggy sleep, but after about a week I was finally free. For the next month I barely even thought about the game. My girlfriend and I packed our socks and sketchbooks and flew to New York to stay with some friends. Brooklyn was home base, but we drove around all over the place on the east coast. We took in the architecture, enjoyed food and visiting (art) museums. NYC with its multiple boroughs, New Jersey, Boston, New Haven, Rochester, Princeton – for three weeks I did nothing but drive around, walk around, look at the people and places and tons and tons of art.

I’d never been Stateside, so there was so much to see and do. I did manage to sketch some, but mostly I took lazy photos: quick snaps with my phone of interesting street corners. I asked my girlfriend to take better quality reference shots with an actual camera. The heat wave taught me why there are AC units in all the windows in all the movies and the midday rains on Manhattan island explained the flash flood warnings blinking on my phone.

Concepting environments for No Truce is a never ending tug-of-war between “this is not realistic enough” and “it’s not weird enough”. Walking the streets and avenues of the different parts of New York City gave me better insight into what makes these places tick. Every district has their own rhythm that comprises building materials and amount of detail or clutter. Interestingly enough smells and sounds can come packaged with colour, too.

Now that I’ve been back for a few weeks, my feet are no longer sore and my spirit is rejuvenated. In addition to all the sensory stimuli (and the whole suitcase full of art books I flew back with) that I can use in my work designing areas for No Truce, I’ve finally digested all the old stuff that has been accumulating in the past year and then some.

We have really crazy times ahead of us here at ZA/UM and now I’m set to rock and roll.

Thank you for reading!

 

[Kasparov]

Let´s add some colour into this dull-ass thread!

 

[Abu Antar]

Let´s add some colour into this dull-ass thread!

 

[Kasparov]

As promised - another post! Our AD Rostow writes about his day concepting a character.


"BIRD’S NEST ROY"
Aleksander Rostov

Little did I realize what a day today would be. I figured “Alright it’s the end of my first week back after vacation! A Friday! Let’s take it easy! Let’s sneak a character concept in there!” They take me like an hour, a good fun break from the usual. So I go check out what characters are next on the list and pick out this dude by the curious name of Bird’s Nest Roy.

“Roy, white male, about 50, tall and gaunt, pawnbroker and drug addict (though the latter is not immediately obvious). His arms, legs, and torso all seem too long, and his hands are too large – expressive hands with long fingers, but nevertheless ugly. Speaks in a quiet, husky smoker’s voice. He was part of the cleanup crew after the People’s Pile disaster. Has traveled extensively. Though he grew up on the coast and runs a pawnshop by the water, he doesn’t like boats.”

First draft. Immediately I’m reminded of a few people I know, these hippie types who’ve gotten older and started dressing down from their regular outlandish gear. You can see this guy having a smoke on the little lawn in front of his 16 story public housing apartment home. An old rocker kinda dude. Add a rigid leather fanny pack as a coin purse for his clerking obligations.



Comments come back from the writers. It’s a good start! The slim silhouette, natural almost invisible way of dress is great. Hair is a bit too wild and cool though. It’s not the hair that’s the Bird’s Nest. Maybe let’s try a lazy ponytail instead?



Alright getting closer. Needs some accessorizing to bring him out of that random dude place, to add some character there. Throw some lopsided shades on him. Maybe a ribbon in his hair? Some kind of memorabilia from the cleanup crew days. Maybe his old jacket? I’m not too keen on breaking his silhouette with more clothes though so I’m thinking we try out an arm band. In retrospect a silly idea.



Naw that’s stupid. It’d much more likely be some kind of an old reflector vest he wore as part of the crew. Maybe some dog tags?



You know what? Dog tags are silly. Way too american. Let’s try like a medallion. And man not so sure about that sweater either. Let’s try like a white jacket. He’s in a room with a projector that’s blasting trippy LSD coloured light all over the place. I think a white jacket would work well as a canvas for the lightshow. Let’s kill the glasses too since the character’s partly written already and the writers would have to go back and edit some bits of text about his eyes.



Man but that jacket sure balloons up now, kinda kills the silhouette we had going with his guy. What if it’s properly buttoned up instead?



You know what. Naw, nope, let’s roll back. That jacket really doesn’t do him justice. Alright so thinking again about the vibe the character is supposed to give off I’m leaning back on that old rocker feeling.. Let’s go full out – a denim vest. Like a biker or something. An old rocker fart. Those dudes love their denim vests.



Pfffft nope that doesn’t work at all. We’ve arrived at some trucker dude / metalhead IT specialist now, all he’s missing is a Manowar print on his chest. You know what, fuck it, roll back. You can’t push the rocker look too much or you get into stereotypes.

Upon reflection that old crew vest was pretty nice. A kind of a believable accessory. You could definitely picture a dude hanging out like that, reflector bits shining. And with the light show going on the glasses were a completely legit idea. No biggie, we’ll just edit a bit of the dialogue. Yes, this works. In hindsight it’s completely obvious that of all the Roys the best Roy is this Roy.

So..

Ladies and gentlemen I give you Bird’s Nest Roy:


–

As an added bonus – soundtrack of the day:

 

[Prime Junta]

Now I sort of want to hang out with Bird's Nest Roy now, although I know how that would end, with my face in a puddle of stale beer on a sticky Formica counter top.

 

[Kasparov]

Now I sort of want to hang out with Bird's Nest Roy now, although I know how that would end, with my face in a puddle of stale beer on a sticky Formica counter top.

With B.N. Roy you´re more likely to find yourself sticking needles into your eyeballs to see if you can still feel anything.

 

[Kasparov]

Doublepost to bring you twitter powered microblogging - more from the AD Alexandre Rosteau:






These screenshots still sport our old protagonist. Soonish you´ll see the updated You strutting around and policing everything in sight

 

[Background Character]

I want this

 

[Kasparov]

I want this

You should.

Anyway. Are any of you still Googling "No Truce With the Furies" while spoon stirring sugar into your morning coffee? I'm guessing it's a "No". Do you even take sugar with your coffee?

Here's an interview on Indiegraze (LINK). I've included the text in this post, but left out pictures. Who cares about pictures?! If you do and want to see our AD Rostov in a wifebeater or the maestro Robert giving you the finger - click on through that link. Erik Meyer was kind enough to talk to us and ask some interesting questions. I hope some of the Codexian questions that have so far gone unanswered were addressed here as well. In any case - feel free to sharpen your pitchforks. My ass is yours:

Interview: No Truce With The Furies Team
on July 19, 2017

Anyone with a keen eye for truly literary RPGs should be drooling at the trailer for No Truce With The Furies, a police procedural isometric with sci-fi/fantasy overtones under development by ZA/UM. With input from Art Director Aleksander Rostov and Lead Designer Robert Kurvitz, the team chatted with me on their project.

Erik Meyer:
For anyone who lived a life saturated in RPGs like Fallout, Planescape: Torment, or Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, the NTWTF trailer will spark curiosity, and the game clearly seeks to redefine and expand on earlier conventions. With a world created by Robert Kurvitz as ongoing source material and visual assets drawing on an oil painting look from Russian Realist painters, what have been the challenges in uniting these varied elements, and which parts ‘clicked’ the fastest?

NTWTF:
There’s over a decade of casual, creative and professional collaboration across disciplines embedded in No Truce With The Furies. Writing lead Robert camped out in art director Aleksander’s studio for years while finishing up the novel that set the stage for the world in which the game takes place. We find the RPG a particularly suitable medium for joining the disciplines of art and literature into a seamless, coherent whole.

What’s interesting is how our major themes manifest in different disciplines. The very existence of the world of No Truce With The Furies is threatened by a phenomenon called the pale, which is as natural as the oceans or space. There are edges in this world where reality sort of ceases to exist. And they move around sometimes. Imagine living in this unnerving world – it’s a wellspring for people of character. The very structure of the universe affects psychology, bringing out eccentricities, producing people whose souls have depth. Even simpletons have at some point thought of grand things – you can’t escape those thoughts when the disintegration of the world is not merely an eschatological threat, but a physical reality.

The art reflects this state of affairs. There is a disproportionate amount of color in this world. Nothing is ever just a flat green or red. There’s depth there, the colors get fragmented and mangled into other hues. Flecks of complementary color add spark and life. The white of a plaster wall is made up of so many greens, blues, pinks and yellows. It’s not that you won’t see a white wall. The wall is white, but if you take the time to study it, you’ll find there are other colors in its structure.

Thus, in the end, it all speaks to the same whole. Take any part away, and it’s no longer No Truce With The Furies.

Erik Meyer:
In well-told stories, audiences often come to love protagonists who aren’t terribly likeable (A Clockwork Orange comes to mind); in NTWTF, players assume the role of a disgraced detective in a police procedural drama. To your mind, what is it about difficult situations and dysfunctional narratives that hooks gamers? As you’ve developed locations, NPCs, and subplots, what do you see as essential to maintaining a consistent yet compelling feel?

NTWTF:
I think what we like about these characters is seeing other humans being human. We were taught in kindergarten under the teacher’s judgmental gaze to divide people into the simplified categories of “good” and “bad”. We were told the police are the good guys who make sure the bad guys get due punishment. Now we know, of course,that this is not necessarily true. And, forgive me for the triteness of this statement, but the bad guy is just the protagonist of his own story, right?

As humans, we’re a gossipy bunch. There’s something infinitely attractive about seeing into the thoughts and experiences of a character who seems so different from us. It’s also enlightening to see that it’s really all the same stuff that makes us tick. And it’s an opportunity to look into someone’s eyes and see beyond our own reflection.

The really killer part is realizing you can mix that experience with player agency via the magical lightning-blasting-out-of-fingertips medium of video games, which allow you to live that life. And with the incredibly overpowered 4th dimensional super power of saving your game, you can see how far you can push a situation, how insane you can go.

We do not recommend save-scumming, though. Please experience your first run of No Truce With The Furies with full acceptance of the consequences of your actions. It’s better that way. See if you have the guts.

A curious little tidbit: at one point in history, before settling on calling our system Metric, the pen-and-paper version of it was called “Come be a person!”

Erik Meyer:
Literary elements take center stage in NTWTF, including combat via dialogue, a thought cabinet to guide players through old mysteries and new ideas, and a keen connection to a constructed history. As you’ve added elements that bring richness to the game experience, what do you hold as your criteria? What benchmarks do different mechanics need to meet, and what kinds of hard decisions has this involved?

NTWTF:
The things we have done, the mechanics we have explored, revolve around bringing fresh gameplay elements into the age-old mechanic of the dialogue. For decades the medium of games has been in a constant state of hurricane stormwinds of mechanical creativity. But, despite this fevered evolution of game design, the Dialogue as a branch of game mechanics has largely been ignored, having been thought of as “good enough” from the get-go. Imagine if FPS games today still had Wolfenstein 3d gunplay: that’s the mechanically stale state that dialogue is in. So much so that it occasionally gets attacked by gameplay-exalting, manifesto-writing designers who want to throw it out as inherently alien to video games, instead of realizing that it’s simply an underdeveloped area of game design.

We’ve taken the systems of our forefathers and tried to virtually run 20 years of video games design process in our heads, so as to arrive at a point where we feel we would be if the development of the dialogue mechanic had not been interrupted.

Should I get into specifics? Some of the mechanics we’ve come up with are the Thought Cabinet, and the red, white and black checks.

Mechanically, the Thought Cabinet offers modulation on your character build. While playing No Truce With The Furies, you talk to people, and find yourself saying some stuff or hearing about something that gives you cause to ponder. This is the Thought Cabinet: you can “equip” thoughts to ruminate over while you play. When a thought is active, it changes your stats, and can give you extra dialogue options or specific bonuses. For instance, the Inexplicable Feminist Agenda gives you bonuses against male characters.

You have a certain amount of ideas you can process, and you can switch your thoughts out, but once you’ve completed a thought or arrived at a conclusion, it results in a permanent change in your character. The fun part here is that these changes can be counterintuitive. After a serious session of philosophizing, you might become enlightened and get bonuses all over the place, or come to the conclusion that the idea was terrible and irrelevant altogether, or it might wreck you with crippling depression. It’s all fuel for roleplaying.

The black checks are passive checks that happen in the background and tie into our skill system. In our system, your skills can talk to you. Have a high enough Drama skill, and your conversations get interspersed with Drama commenting on how someone is obviously lying, thus giving you a deeper understanding of the situation. A high Half Light, a sort of strongman adrenal gland skill, can give you violent dialogue options and incite you to act on them. The black checks represent your inner impulses and psyche, and, depending on how you want to roleplay your character, you can listen to them or ignore them. They’re not infallible either and can get you into trouble if you’re not careful.

The red and white checks are dialogue options for which you roll the dice to see if you fail or succeed. Most dialogues are written to have one such check in it. White checks are simple enough. Say you’re trying to deduce something using your Logic skill. Your stats and skills get added up and rolled against the difficulty of the white check, and you either deduce something or you don’t. If you fail, you can try again later. Red checks are the juicy ones – succeed or fail, you have to play through the consequences of your actions. A red check failure is that garish pick up line you botched and can’t back out of. You’re locked into it now, the horrible situation plays out line by line, you’re digging yourself in ever deeper, thinking, “Oh sweet Jesus, why did you have to say that”? Sweet honey-dripping awkward until the merciful end.

And here is where the interconnected nature of dialogues in No Truce With The Furies shines. Depending on things you’ve said earlier, you can get bonuses or penalties on these rolls. Broke down crying in front of a girl? She might feel sympathy for you. Add to that whatever thoughts might be lingering in your head and the social effect of the clothes you’re wearing (hint: bellbottom pants really do not make you look authoritative!). All of this is weighed when you’re rolling for that red check.

This rhizomatic, interdependent web of modulation is what brings the dialogues to life. We want to write dialogue that IS the game – as fun to navigate as 3d worlds, as fun to play as tactical combat and as enjoyable to read as any good book. Them’s the criteria for our systems design.

Erik Meyer:
You’ve spoken in other interviews to the fact that details and personal connections bring worlds to life. NTWTF celebrates the unique, multi-millenia timelines of numerous civilizations; here on present-day Earth, many people remember the Roman Empire by way of togas and cool architecture, much as they remember the ’80s via Deloreans, Moon Boots, and He-Man. For the game universe, how large is this role of inherited memory, and what kinds of influence do you see its minutiae exercising?

NTWTF:
These elements permeate society in No Truce With The The Furies. People wear belt buckles with ornate lung designs as a reference to Innocence Dolores Dei, a benevolent maternal zeitgeist-defining semi-religious figure who lived some centuries ago.

To take a step back, all of today is accumulated history, and, whatever Fukuyama might have you believe, history is never done. When we think about the world we’re creating, we don’t think in terms of snapshots of a perfectly composed world. Fictional worlds often suffer from stasis, where the demiurge designer fixes the perfect moment down with superglue. To counteract this, it helps to think on a grander scale, to see things in terms of historical processes building up and eroding away. People may live in houses built a hundred years ago, but life today is different from what it was like then. The old gets modified for contemporary use, though the origins remain plain to see. What we’re doing is applying dialectical materialism to world design.

Movements and tendencies that will shape the future are also already at play in their nascent forms, and in No Truce With The Furies, just as in our world, if you pay enough attention, you can almost glimpse the future.

A nifty midway point that our world occupies is that we have the mass production of swords. They’re forged, pulled, hammered, bent and grinded by heavy industrial machinery. The handles are cast in bakelite resin. Final assembly is by the underpaid proletariat huddling around lengths of conveyor belts. And these swords are surrounded by familiar debates: some people feel they’re not of the same mettle as the old smith-forged swords with their arabesques on swooping hilts, the narwhal and giraffe designs, while others see the wonders of the modern world, the cost savings of industrial automation, bold aesthetic simplification and mechanical perfection – the democratization of the sword.

In our world, there are people pining for the old days of monarchs and cavalry maneuvers, and there are people who look forward to robots with magnetic limb sockets. There are people who know that you can split the atom.

Erik Meyer:
Technology in NTWTF has progressed on a course roughly parallel to our own, with civilization leading to something akin to Modernism. Describe the advantages of making cars, but cars that don’t quite look like our cars, or tiled floors that appear familiar yet askew. How do you leverage this connection to gizmos and know-how?

NTWTF:
What it really does is lend credibility to the world. The desk telephone is the single most realistic invention in the history of mankind. As powerful as the wheel, as boring as sliced bread. Normality is boring and there is secret power in that. Normality gives us the ability to see ourselves in this world, we can imagine a mundane wasted day among telephones, corner kiosks and bus stops. And this is the sweet spot for juxtaposition, but you don’t necessarily have to go full fantasy to achieve it. For instance, have you ever seen a horse in a city? That’s a moment in which anachronism is embodied. The horse immediately speaks of medieval knights and wild west cowboys, and even though today it is relegated to breeding ranches for annoyingly wealthy people, these embedded historic images surface, and seeing this majestic animal trotting down the street between gridlocked cars is amazingly jarring. And that’s the kind of feeling we want to take and multiply tenfold.

Erik Meyer:
Each developer/studio has its own way of doing things, and the ZA/UM artist community includes people of varied talents, bringing unique perspectives to your work. In terms of streamlining these talents into game design and progress, what does your process look like?

NTWTF:
There can be a lot of back and forth, and sometimes passions do flare up. You’d expect as much from any creative collective, though. A lot of our people have creative backgrounds, from writing, painting or running D&D games. This gives some common ground to understand that things aren’t great until you suffer through the bad.

There’s a feeling of vulnerability in effect there as well. It takes almost nihilistic bravado to have the guts to show people your works in progress. It’s necessary for the collaborative process, but it can be difficult to press on with merely the hope that your peers see something you’re working on beyond its current sorry state, that they can gauge the possibilities therein. But that’s the nature of the beast: to make something grand, you go through an iterative grind of culling bad solutions until you’re left with the okay. And sometimes you need to have the courage to throw out the good to get to the great.

In this spirit, we have redone entire areas and rewritten entire characters in No Truce With The Furies to fit better with the whole. There’s a tour of shame hidden away on our hard drives, early concepts of places and characters you wouldn’t recognize. Mechanics and design ideas left mangled on the cutting room floor. If there’s one idea that can be hard to impart on more pragmatic people, it’s that it’s shit until it’s great.

We sincerely believe that it’s better for the artist to leave the art undone if it’s not good. Look at your Steam library. Nobody needs another game released. We don’t want to work on just another game. What we need is a masterpiece, and so we do what we must.

Erik Meyer:
I’m curious about your take on stats versus storytelling and how you see the two as connecting. You’ve mentioned that the game has 24 skills and 4 attributes, noting impacts on the playing experience. If a player starts down a specific path, does it become difficult to ‘change lanes’, and to what extent are players rewarded for consistently maintaining a particular ethic?

NTWTF:
In terms of classic RPG dichotomies, there are no lanes to follow in No Truce, no paragon or renegade archetypes to choose between. Instead, the skills and their influence on the plot form a complex interwoven structure, revealing different aspects of the plot and the world as you play. Some of these might even be contradictory, resulting in straight up cognitive dissonance in your character. You can build a really schizophrenic type, whose skills start arguing against each other and vying for the player’s attention.

However, there are more concrete archetypes you can settle into if you wish. We have political leanings in the game – you can be a hard core nationalist, a communist, a “radically centrist” neoliberal we call moralist. O ye boring person of meager soul, raise high the moralist flag of signal blue!

While playing the game, you get these little snippets of choice where you can demonstrate your leanings, and, as the game goes on, you get associated Thought Cabinet projects to ruminate over your ideology and get the relevant skill bonuses. And if you really fly the flag, you can do a kind of a vision quest for your ideology to cement your beliefs. This might involve having a fevered conversation with the broken down statue of one of the old Philippian monarchs, sword in hand. Or it might not! Design in process.

(Insert more money for awesome political vision quests)

Erik Meyer:
You’re developing relationships via Humble Bundle, social media, and the public at large. What responses have surprised you along the way? What kinds of connections do you see forming within the developer community, and how do you see your movement growing?

NTWTF:
What we’re really trying to get to is a community of video game designers who view their work as carrying responsibilities beyond those of a toymaker. In video game culture, we have this destructive adoration of fun which rules as an idolatrous tyrant over all other considerations. You can uncover downright scary fundamentalist rage online if you have the gall to challenge this tenet.

For me, the fact that we call these creations “video games” is essentially an etymological curiosity. They have long since stopped being games.

This is a controversial enough statement that it should probably be supported by additional statements such as: shit video games can also be fun, but that doesn’t make them good. Good video games can be not fun, and that doesn’t make them bad. Fun is an aspect among many, and it’s harmful to elevate it above others. A thing doesn’t have to be fun to keep you engaged either – it has to be engaging. We should be wreaking havoc on internet forums demanding for games to be engaging!

Oh, but I digress. We’re trying to reach out to developers who take responsibility for their creations, who see their work as more than bleak entertainment. Creating games is an opportunity to challenge, to enrich, to stir emotions. And the hope is, if you get these people – these designers, companies and authors – together, you can start doing something. That’s how you get a voice, say something and have people hear you, get out of the video game ghetto and impact humanity and culture at large.

And you know what? If to add what the community has taught us or what relationships we have made, then we have really been thinking about localization and porting. It is not just an industry thing to consider in need to reach wider, no, a lot of it is your fans and supporters asking for it. Linux lovers is a whole universe and man they are loudspoken! These kids literally say: “Look, I do not live with my mum, I work and will throw money at you if you fill our wishes. And there is detective story lovers who want to read in their own language and they have voiced their needs to us and we really want to answer to that by delivering to those who asked.

 

[Prime Junta]

Holy shit that was a good interview, the interviewer actually knew his shit -- none of the usual "so you guys are from Karelia right?" stuff.

(Only children and Americans take sugar with their coffee.)

Edit: ping Infinitron, is this newsworthy?

 

[Kasparov]

Holy shit that was a good interview, the interviewer actually knew his shit -- none of the usual "so you guys are from Karelia right?" stuff.

(Only children and Americans take sugar with their coffee.)

Edit: ping Infinitron, is this newsworthy?

Yeah, it's always a pleasure. I think Lexxx's Long lost Questionnaire finally got answers too - this interview went in-depth with most of the issues that interested him and got input from the right people who're in the know of certain things about the world and the game.

I take mine black or with some foamy milk (I know how it sounds...)

 

[HoboForEternity]

Inexplicable Feminist Agenda

seems like the skill that will give stat debuff "rage" to most codexers

 

[Kasparov]

The design philosophy hits all the marks for me and easily suits the idealised image of worldbuilding I always yearn for and bitch for, yet the game seems devoid of mechanical challenge proper, which is kind of implied by the "dare not to savescum" bit; playthroughs seem to be meant to be intricate experiences, rather than game scenarios with clearly defined victory conditions and fail-states

How clear any conditions are may depend on the individual player, but I´m confident victory and fail-states are defined where necessary. In that sense NTWTF is unlike Kentucky Route Zero - it is not only ambience and story (-faggotry). If you make a series of wrong turns - and I don´t necessarily mean dialogue choices - you´re deader than dead, the ultimate failure.

seems like the skill that will give stat debuff "rage" to most codexers

idiots enrage swiftly *nod self*

 

[Prime Junta]

pinkos

I've seen them friend. They ain't pink, they're blood-red Bolsheviks.

 

[Kasparov]

How clear any conditions are may depend on the individual player, but I´m confident victory and fail-states are defined where necessary. In that sense NTWTF is unlike Kentucky Route Zero - it is not only ambience and story (-faggotry). If you make a series of wrong turns - and I don´t necessarily mean dialogue choices - you´re deader than dead, the ultimate failure.

But to what extent is the Thought Cabinet vital to winning the game? Is it an actual gameplay element you simply need to master in order to do your thing?

Thought Cabinet "projects" affect your rolls. If you learn to use it - it´ll be an asset. Is it necessary to succeed in rolls to win the game?

I'm also conflicted about the idea of ruminating on ideas, how long does it take for an idea to get processed? Is it timed, or perhaps does it fit a frame of some in-game progression (quest or otherwise)? Is winning the game possible without having ruminated on anything really? Did you time the optimal point when such ideas should kick in and start intervening with wordplay

Like in most inventories - you get to equip thoughts - that is when they become active. You get new thoughts from various sources. Some need certain skills to be triggered. You could get a thought from observing something in the environment or by talking to a person. Active thoughts begin a countdown. The time it takes for a thought to mature depends on the thought. Like any mechanic - Thought Cabinet is subject to balancing.

The mechanics are of keen interest to me if the game were to remain a cRPG rather than an innovative adventure game, and I don't say that to dismiss it (as adventure games are sadly treated as a trash heap for all kinds of semi-artistic endeavours these days)

It is true that one could view NTWTF as something that falls between there somewhere. We design the game as a role playing game - your character build affects how and to what degree of success you can interact with the world and its inhabitants.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

As promised - another post! Our AD Rostow writes about his day concepting a character.

Spoiler

"BIRD’S NEST ROY"
Aleksander Rostov

Little did I realize what a day today would be. I figured “Alright it’s the end of my first week back after vacation! A Friday! Let’s take it easy! Let’s sneak a character concept in there!” They take me like an hour, a good fun break from the usual. So I go check out what characters are next on the list and pick out this dude by the curious name of Bird’s Nest Roy.

“Roy, white male, about 50, tall and gaunt, pawnbroker and drug addict (though the latter is not immediately obvious). His arms, legs, and torso all seem too long, and his hands are too large – expressive hands with long fingers, but nevertheless ugly. Speaks in a quiet, husky smoker’s voice. He was part of the cleanup crew after the People’s Pile disaster. Has traveled extensively. Though he grew up on the coast and runs a pawnshop by the water, he doesn’t like boats.”

First draft. Immediately I’m reminded of a few people I know, these hippie types who’ve gotten older and started dressing down from their regular outlandish gear. You can see this guy having a smoke on the little lawn in front of his 16 story public housing apartment home. An old rocker kinda dude. Add a rigid leather fanny pack as a coin purse for his clerking obligations.



Comments come back from the writers. It’s a good start! The slim silhouette, natural almost invisible way of dress is great. Hair is a bit too wild and cool though. It’s not the hair that’s the Bird’s Nest. Maybe let’s try a lazy ponytail instead?



Alright getting closer. Needs some accessorizing to bring him out of that random dude place, to add some character there. Throw some lopsided shades on him. Maybe a ribbon in his hair? Some kind of memorabilia from the cleanup crew days. Maybe his old jacket? I’m not too keen on breaking his silhouette with more clothes though so I’m thinking we try out an arm band. In retrospect a silly idea.



Naw that’s stupid. It’d much more likely be some kind of an old reflector vest he wore as part of the crew. Maybe some dog tags?



You know what? Dog tags are silly. Way too american. Let’s try like a medallion. And man not so sure about that sweater either. Let’s try like a white jacket. He’s in a room with a projector that’s blasting trippy LSD coloured light all over the place. I think a white jacket would work well as a canvas for the lightshow. Let’s kill the glasses too since the character’s partly written already and the writers would have to go back and edit some bits of text about his eyes.



Man but that jacket sure balloons up now, kinda kills the silhouette we had going with his guy. What if it’s properly buttoned up instead?



You know what. Naw, nope, let’s roll back. That jacket really doesn’t do him justice. Alright so thinking again about the vibe the character is supposed to give off I’m leaning back on that old rocker feeling.. Let’s go full out – a denim vest. Like a biker or something. An old rocker fart. Those dudes love their denim vests.



Pfffft nope that doesn’t work at all. We’ve arrived at some trucker dude / metalhead IT specialist now, all he’s missing is a Manowar print on his chest. You know what, fuck it, roll back. You can’t push the rocker look too much or you get into stereotypes.

Upon reflection that old crew vest was pretty nice. A kind of a believable accessory. You could definitely picture a dude hanging out like that, reflector bits shining. And with the light show going on the glasses were a completely legit idea. No biggie, we’ll just edit a bit of the dialogue. Yes, this works. In hindsight it’s completely obvious that of all the Roys the best Roy is this Roy.

So..

Ladies and gentlemen I give you Bird’s Nest Roy:


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As an added bonus – soundtrack of the day:

How much time does it take to make each iteration?
Also the problem with vests was that they all seem unnaturally thin. The fabric is too thin.

 

[Kasparov]

With this one I believe Rostov was bouncing it back and forth with the writers live - minutes between iterations (I saw that going down from the chat alerts in the bottom right corner of my screen). The whole thing was a few hours probably plus typing up this blog post.

As to the vest - tweaks and changes happen during sculpting and modeling as well. The end goal is to have everything work in-game with the animations we're doing.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

What we’re really trying to get to is a community of video game designers who view their work as carrying responsibilities beyond those of a toymaker. In video game culture, we have this destructive adoration of fun which rules as an idolatrous tyrant over all other considerations. You can uncover downright scary fundamentalist rage online if you have the gall to challenge this tenet.

I want some quality examples. That sounds entertaining as hell

 

[Prime Junta]

^
approves this initiative to end fun in video games.

 

[Lexxx20]

I think Lexxx's Long lost Questionnaire finally got answers too - this interview went in-depth with most of the issues that interested him and got input from the right people who're in the know of certain things about the world and the game.

Yay, finally!!! That's glorius news, comrade Can't wait to put my hands on it

 

[Kasparov]

Agree 100%. I think they are making a Point-and-Click Adventure game and haven't even realized. It's basically a modernized Sierra classic. Nothing against that. But it's very obvious that there are too many artists/writers in the room, appealing to the wrong crowd.

You´re being extremely rude by referring to me in third person while I´m in the room.

 

[Kasparov]

You´re being extremely rude by referring to me in third person while I´m in the room.

Sorry.

Any videos of game-play mechanics you'd like to share?

Eventually. We´re not in the habit of showing shit quality shit, so we´ll take our sweet time about it. Also - to demo these mechanics we´d need to record a good snippet of gameplay to go with it. Late August I believe is the time for that.

 

[Prime Junta]

But it's very obvious that there are too many artists/writers in the room, appealing to the wrong crowd.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case. There are many genuine artists in the room for sure, but from what I've seen (1) they're all pulling in the same direction, more or less, and (2) they're all addressing somewhat different things. From what I can tell, everybody's very clear about who's in charge of which artistic aspect of the game.

What they're doing is incredibly ambitious, and I feel for the poor beleaguered programmers who have to take all that artistic vision and actually make it work without turning it into another Waiting for Grimoire story -- but lack of coherence of vision or "too many cooks" is not a problem here.

Whether it qualifies as a RPG or not is IMO something of a futile discussion. From where I'm at it certainly qualifies if you take a definition broad enough to include, say, The Witchers. By the grog definition which puts tactical combat at the centre of the definition, it won't. Personally I don't give a shit. It's certainly more ambitious mechanically than any adventure game I've come across.

 

[Prime Junta]

I mean no offense, but what programmers? Where?

In Tallinn. Cool guys, you'd like them. I ran a workshop for them a couple of months ago.

Is this a programmer at ZA/UM?

No, that would be the artistic lead.