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

Marat Sar

ZA/UM
Developer
Joined
Nov 12, 2014
Messages
49
Marat Sar Kasparov

Bros, you may have already answered this question and I missed it, but were you involved in some notable gamedev projects before?

Not really. We've had to teach ourselves from the ground up, programmers too. A lot of gifted people, in code, art and writing, but none with actual prior notable shipping experience. A designer who has actually shipped games just joined us four months back. Yeah! Lucky charm. But -- game development )even on this "indie" level) is a prerogative that is incredibly hard to earn. Getting together investment and immense social reservoirs, over the years... so I don't blame us for not getting here earlier. Wasn't possible any other way.

What we *have* all done is immense amounts of pen and paper. I've designed the system since we were 16, which is when we started coming up with the whole thing. The setting and rule system saw years and years of play. And as many test players as we could muster. The world, especially, has seen about 10 consecutive versions where we started out with an almost bronze age setting and then climbed through historic periods as we, piece by piece, saw how it's possible to construct a modern fantasy world with a complete history of technology and culture behind it. A non-static world. Most of our programmers too are D/D buffs. SO that's where our design confidence comes from. Personally, I think DM-ing is where my so called "gift" lies. It's what I feel best doing on this Earth, I think.

The importance of D/D in our design, I can not overstate.

If I were asked if this is how I recommend someone found their studio, then yes. I think it's a valid way. Do get a producer who's run larger software projects though, if you can grab one early. Woulda been a good idea I think.
 
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Prime Junta

Guest
Good luck. Shipping the damn thing is hard. I at least will have a lot of understanding for slipping schedules.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
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Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The RPS lady noticed you: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/13/no-truce-with-the-furies/

Procedural cop RPG No Truce with the Furies sounds so very odd and exciting

13notruce.jpg


If No Truce with the Furies [official site] is a “police procedural RPG”, as developers ZA/UM Studio say, then I want to see its world’s CSI series. It stars a disgraced detective in an anotherworldly seaside town, and sounds to be full of interesting ideas. The devs talk about an inventory for thoughts, about walking around the inside of your own head to talk to your senses and memories, about strengths coming with weaknesses, about Planescape: Torment and Kentucky Route Zero as big influences, about disco pants… I don’t know what this game is but I want to. If you’re interested too, hey, peep this trailer:



I mentioned No Furies briefly after Humble announced it’s part of their initial publishing lineup, but goodness me it warrants a post of its own. After that post, I rummaged in the dev blog and — goodness me! — it fizzes with ideas.

Dialogue happens through a weird tape computer which is itself part of an in-world mystery. They want a feel of Dungeons & Dragons – but the focus of “heavy-duty story-oriented D&D” rather than just tactical combat. Passive skills interject to inform you of things. Dialogue is combat and combat is dialogue, and digging in your thought inventory (or drug bag) can be vital:

“You can prop up your side by rummaging through your Thought Cabinet and changing stuff around: maybe it would pay to be a radical feminist at this juncture? Or wait, no! Better to think really, really hardcore racist thoughts. That’ll do the trick, dazzle them with your advanced race theory! But would your character do that? Do you want to take your character in that direction?”

And even if you do fail, you might be glad to:

“Failure puts you in the skin of your character. You can be embarrassing. Weak. Ridiculous. Full of yourself. Just plain wrong. Paranoid. Idiotic. Every director knows that actors build characters out of failures and fears, not heroics. We’ve noticed players instinctively feel the same way. They begin to search for red checks to fail at. Especially the right ones – the ones that fit their character. They do this for character building, but also because they’re curious of the outcome. It feels like playing with fire.”

13notruce2.jpg


Or this, read this about character attributes and how even your strengths can worth against you:

“A high Intellect makes you overly confident – a cocksure intellectual. You’re vulnerable to flattery, and easily lose yourself in details. (The game becomes longer). While having a low Intellect makes you dim and superficial, prone to superstition and being plain wrong.”

All of this sounds great. Reading through their ideas and explanations has me jolly excited for a game where you’re always flawed but you struggle to overcome, and interesting things happen even when it does go wrong. As an expert fuck-up often undone by my own ‘strengths’ but enjoying the oddities that can cause and rolling ever onwards, I’m delighted to see No Truce reaching towards this. I couldn’t tell you how this all comes together, or whether the writing can carry it, or… but the ideas are very exciting.

Screenshots and videos are quite pretty too, and apparently they’ve got music from that there British Sea Power who are always on the radio.

No Truce with the Furies is due around the end of 2017. Only another 300 or so sleeps!
 

Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
The RPS lady noticed you: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/13/no-truce-with-the-furies/
Procedural cop RPG No Truce with the Furies sounds so very odd and exciting

13notruce.jpg


If No Truce with the Furies [official site] is a “police procedural RPG”, as developers ZA/UM Studio say, then I want to see its world’s CSI series. It stars a disgraced detective in an anotherworldly seaside town, and sounds to be full of interesting ideas. The devs talk about an inventory for thoughts, about walking around the inside of your own head to talk to your senses and memories, about strengths coming with weaknesses, about Planescape: Torment and Kentucky Route Zero as big influences, about disco pants… I don’t know what this game is but I want to. If you’re interested too, hey, peep this trailer:



I mentioned No Furies briefly after Humble announced it’s part of their initial publishing lineup, but goodness me it warrants a post of its own. After that post, I rummaged in the dev blog and — goodness me! — it fizzes with ideas.

Dialogue happens through a weird tape computer which is itself part of an in-world mystery. They want a feel of Dungeons & Dragons – but the focus of “heavy-duty story-oriented D&D” rather than just tactical combat. Passive skills interject to inform you of things. Dialogue is combat and combat is dialogue, and digging in your thought inventory (or drug bag) can be vital:

“You can prop up your side by rummaging through your Thought Cabinet and changing stuff around: maybe it would pay to be a radical feminist at this juncture? Or wait, no! Better to think really, really hardcore racist thoughts. That’ll do the trick, dazzle them with your advanced race theory! But would your character do that? Do you want to take your character in that direction?”

And even if you do fail, you might be glad to:

“Failure puts you in the skin of your character. You can be embarrassing. Weak. Ridiculous. Full of yourself. Just plain wrong. Paranoid. Idiotic. Every director knows that actors build characters out of failures and fears, not heroics. We’ve noticed players instinctively feel the same way. They begin to search for red checks to fail at. Especially the right ones – the ones that fit their character. They do this for character building, but also because they’re curious of the outcome. It feels like playing with fire.”

13notruce2.jpg


Or this, read this about character attributes and how even your strengths can worth against you:

“A high Intellect makes you overly confident – a cocksure intellectual. You’re vulnerable to flattery, and easily lose yourself in details. (The game becomes longer). While having a low Intellect makes you dim and superficial, prone to superstition and being plain wrong.”

All of this sounds great. Reading through their ideas and explanations has me jolly excited for a game where you’re always flawed but you struggle to overcome, and interesting things happen even when it does go wrong. As an expert fuck-up often undone by my own ‘strengths’ but enjoying the oddities that can cause and rolling ever onwards, I’m delighted to see No Truce reaching towards this. I couldn’t tell you how this all comes together, or whether the writing can carry it, or… but the ideas are very exciting.

Screenshots and videos are quite pretty too, and apparently they’ve got music from that there British Sea Power who are always on the radio.

No Truce with the Furies is due around the end of 2017. Only another 300 or so sleeps!


Thanks for the heads up! We saw that too. They sure took their sweet time even aknowledging our existence. Must have been that big humble beast who now lets us ride along in its thick mat of back hair.

EDIT:

Hohoho, now they are also getting on the furry train!
 
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Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
Mostly a simple aknowledgment and links to the trailers, but Kotaku featured us as well: http://kotaku.com/1792321932

The commentary section is predictable. Because of popular demand our game will now be (unofficially) known as "No Peace Whatsoever With Those Furries"

EDIT:
I know there´s that "doggy" tag you can add to posts, but there really should be a "Furry" in addition to "Funny" and "Aknowledge this user´s agenda" etc
 
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Prime Junta

Guest
New dev blog: http://devblog.fortressoccident.com/2017/02/13/meet-skills-intellect/

Visual Calculus is your forensics skill. It represents your grasp of the laws of physics, motion particularly. Create models of past events in your mind’s eye, trace dotted lines across the room, read tire tracks to recreate an automobile accident. Even notice tactical opportunities in combat situations – then take advantage of them. (Perception + Visual Calculus = the ultimate sniper)

We’re building a special, stylistic overlay that covers the world when certain Visual Calculus checks succeed. This lets us visualize shards of glass falling out of the window, a car backing into the fence, or political prisoners standing in front of a firing squad, half a century ago… all painted into the isometric world around you.

Be still my beating heart
 

Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
Putting the pretty pictures up, too:


"Meet The Skills: Intellect"

Robert Kurvitz
Game Designer

In Metric (our character system) there are six skills that comprise your Intellect: Logic, Rhetoric, Drama, Encyclopedia, Conceptualization and Visual Calculus. They are represented here by their work-in-progress portraits.


LOGIC



is raw intellectual power. If you want to analyze the living daylights out of the case, take Logic. Formulate theories about what happened, or detect inconsistencies in the statements people make to you. It’s useful for not getting bamboozled.

Logic loves being right, however. To a fault. It’s a brilliant lie detector until faced with intellectual flattery. Then it starts tooting its own horn. Your Drama skill might interfere: people are pretending, manipulating you, while Logic – blinded by its own brilliance – yammers on about how infallible it is.

In heroic difficulty rolls, Logic can induce near-transcendence-like pleasure from performing raw operations on events and numbers. (It also does maths for you.) And it states the obvious. Logic loves an easy challenge, whatever it’s claims.


RHETORIC



is your ability to debate. Nitpick, make intellectual discourse. It doesn’t need to be an argument, you can just shoot off your mouth and take hearty pleasure from it. But let’s be honest – mostly Rhetoric just bickers. About politics.

All political discourse falls under Rhetoric. You can mold it into a weapon of fascist sable rattling, evicting potato-loving kojkos and deformed himean pygmees left to right. Rid Revachol of aliens in transit! Or become the ultimate liberast (perpetrator of the sin of liberasty), extolling free trade and slimy personal freedoms at the expense of the downtrodden. This is achieved through researching political projects in your Thought Cabinet, then having them supercharge your Rhetoric skill.

A souped up, ideologically informed Rhetoric is an impressive beast, but it gets you into trouble. The twist here is that Rhetoric – our persuasion ability – doesn’t really persuade anyone. Most of the time it just makes you new enemies. While your beliefs calcify.


ENCYCLOPEDIA



is your knack for trivia. It’s perhaps the talkiest of all the skills, pulling out drawers of fascinating if questionable tidbits of knowledge. Sometimes real nuggets of gold too. It’s up to you to discern between the two.

Encyclopedia adores brands, marks, makes of pistolette and motor-carriage, street names, addresses, species of cockatoo, Great Century military leaders, rock music icons, Messinian ceramic manufacturers … Buy it and max it out, if you want a deluge of lore.

You may even find special, reoccurring places within your Encyclopedia. Like visions: a blackboard of names with all the cops in East Revachol on it, with all their confirmed kills and cases solved. Or a mysterious index of radio frequencies…


DRAMA



is a god damn liar. Deliver believable deviations from reality, sometimes with the goal to deceive people, but not necessarily. You may just want to entertain as well.

We thought long and hard about how deceit is handled in RPGs and decided it needs to be more about performance in No Truce With The Furies. We want each of the skills to be a little world of it’s own, an investment worth considering. So lying became stagecraft, an amalgam of fourberie and deceit, with entertainment – and even singing. You can do karaoke with Drama, or perform spot on imitations of people.

Drama is also the counter to Drama. It informs you when Drama is being used on you. And although Intellect skills in general are more mentally oriented, Drama has its uses in combat as well. Feign death. Do drunken fighting. Maybe even quadrupedal movement…


CONCEPTUALIZATION



is your capacity for original thought. Make fresh associations, really delve into the concepts of the world – from Jan Kaarp’s postmodernist karperie, to Revachol’s arabesque architectural style dideridada, or even the concept of hardcore as deployed by the burgeoning dance music scene – then add your own contribution to these works! It’s your general purpose cultural theorist, used for both criticism and creation.

Okay, I’ll level with you. Conceptualization makes you into an Art Cop. You get extra lines of description in scenes, and you get to come up with stuff like poems, one-liners and a cool nom de guerre for yourself. An artist’s name, if you will. Conceptualization is the difference between hanging yourself and jumping into a live volcano. (No literal live volcanos are present in No Truce With The Furies for the time being.)


VISUAL CALCULUS



is your forensics skill. It represents your grasp of the laws of physics, motion particularly. Create models of past events in your mind’s eye, trace dotted lines across the room, read tire tracks to recreate an automobile accident. Even notice tactical opportunities in combat situations – then take advantage of them. (Perception + Visual Calculus = the ultimate sniper)

We’re building a special, stylistic overlay that covers the world when certain Visual Calculus checks succeed. This lets us visualize shards of glass falling out of the window, a car backing into the fence, or political prisoners standing in front of a firing squad, half a century ago… all painted into the isometric world around you.

It looks great and I’m really sorry we haven’t shown it off yet. Just a few more tweaks first though…

I’m going to be candid and say Visual Calculus is a really cool skill and you should probably take it if you don’t want to miss out on all the cool. The only reason not to take it is that it’s a luxury. You need more essential stuff to stay alive and on top of things.



So to wrap it up – Intellect does not make you get on well with yourself, or with other people. It lets you peel off layer after layer from the world, getting to its inner workings, modelling its events and bending it’s structures. If that’s what you want, stick five or six points into it at character creation and later buy two or three skills to boot.

It’s been my ambition as a pen and paper DM to make heavy mental labour as engaging and wildly entertaining as combat, or even more so. Of the four main Attributes, Intellect was perhaps the hardest to nail. What it really comes down to is how the actual situations are written in the game — and most of all, how interestingly you play them out. The skills are just prompters in the play you’re starring in, whispering suggestions to you from within. It’s up to you to decide whose ideas you want more of, and what to do with them. But naming and dividing between areas of juristiction is everything in systems — and I’m certain this cast was worth getting together all these years.

(Next time we’ll introduce the Psyche skills to you. Inland Empire is my favourite.)
 

Zdzisiu

Arcane
Joined
Dec 3, 2009
Messages
3,489
ultimate liberast (perpetrator of the sin of liberasty)
If that's your official in-game description, I suggest changing this bit - the "pun" would be lost on non-Russians, as the word it alludes to went out of active usage ages ago.
It works well for Potato people still. I would leave it there, no huge deal if some westerners don't get it, other people will.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
ultimate liberast (perpetrator of the sin of liberasty)
If that's your official in-game description, I suggest changing this bit - the "pun" would be lost on non-Russians, as the word it alludes to went out of active usage ages ago.
It works well for Potato people still. I would leave it there, no huge deal if some westerners don't get it, other people will.
It's just awkwatd language, and for a game that lives and dies by its writing it's unacceptable. I'm pretty sure there's some native English slur for liberals that could be used instead.
 

Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
It's just awkwatd language, and for a game that lives and dies by its writing it's unacceptable. I'm pretty sure there's some native English slur for liberals that could be used instead.

Nope. The fact that "some people" don't understand off the bat what some phrase alludes to, is or was - that is definitely not grounds to switch it out for something that is simply more convenient for the reader. I'm sure you'll call me out for bringing up Joyce, but imagine if Ulysses were edited for casual Sunday reading.

No Truce With the Furies is not an obnoxious academical text, but it should be more complex and interesting than regular small talk. And hey - what did they invent Google for? Or Wikipedia? If there is enough interest, we'll ship the game with an Encyclopedia.

If you get it - pat tourself on the back. If you don't - look it up, brother! No Truce allows alt-tabbing.
 
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Prime Junta

Guest
It's just awkwatd language, and for a game that lives and dies by its writing it's unacceptable. I'm pretty sure there's some native English slur for liberals that could be used instead.

Rubbish, anyone who's halfway literate will get the reference. This isn't a game for illiterates.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
It's just awkwatd language, and for a game that lives and dies by its writing it's unacceptable. I'm pretty sure there's some native English slur for liberals that could be used instead.

Nope. The fact that "some people" don't understand off the bat what some phrase alludes to, is or was - that is definitely not grounds to switch it out for simething that is sinply more convenient for the reader. I'm sure you'll call me out for bringing up Joyce, but imagine if Ulysses were edited for casual Sunday reading.

No Truce With the Furies is not an obnoxious academical text, but it should be more complex and interesting than regular small talk. And hey - what did they invent Google for? Or Wikipedia? If there is enough interest, we'll ship the game with an Encyclopedia.

If you get it - pat tourself on the back. If you don't - look it up, brother! No Truce allows alt-tabbing.
That's just studpid. There's a big difference between complex style and bad style.
 

Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
You're so full of yourself you run the risk of exploding one day.
I have a memo on my desktop to call my GP to renew my prescription for hemorrhoid cream - if you wish I´m willing to help you restock your supplies as well. I accept PayPal.

Really, in this case I will wear your taunt as a badge of honor.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
This isn't Book of the New Sun, and much less is it Joyce or Chekhov. It's Elena Kolyadina and her aphedron fiasco. I believe Kasparov would get the reference.
 

Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
I feel like I´m standing at a very literal aphedron and I´m going to run dry any minute now. Let us stop this nonsense. I realize we crossed the line of "agreeing to disagree", but if there really is anything retarded here - it is that. We can continue this conversation in... what did that RPS journo say - in about 300 sleeps? Let´s do that.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
Well, there's also the ulterior issue that when you're a left-leaning gay guy living in Russia, finding this discourse reproduced elsewhere, particularly in a supposedly "high-brow" context, is a rather unpleasant experience. But I also honestly believe that it's Runglish in its worst form, and I have some experience with editing Russian-to-English translations, and my English-language texts being edited by native speakers, so I'm not talking out of my ass here.
Now we can count down the seconds before I'm branded an SJW.
 

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