![]() ![]() You can grill suspects about their movements on the night of the murder and look for holes in their stories about what they saw. Played straight, there's a meticulous satisfaction in assuming the role of by-the-book cop. You and your new partner, the unflappable and eternally patient Kim Kitsuragi, at first inspect the body, interview potential witnesses and generally gather clues to identify the victim and track down the perpetrator. Your amnesiac cop quickly discovers he's been assigned to investigate a murder-what appears to be a lynching-in a small, seaside town. Yet in all kinds of other ways-thematically and mechanically-Disco Elysium is very unlike other RPGs. There are quests to initiate, experience to gain, levels to up, dialogue trees to climb, and skill checks to fail. It proceeds with the traditional top-down view of the world, your party members traversing beautiful, hand-painted 2D environments, pausing to inspect objects and talk to people. Indeed, it opens with a nod to Planescape Torment with a semi-naked figure lying on a cold, hard slab before slowly rising to his feet-only the slab isn't in a mortuary, it's in a cheap motel room, and the figure wasn't recently dead, he's just still drunk. Some industrial design for a slice of environment that you can barely see in the game.By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot'sĭisco Elysium presents as an RPG in the mold of Baldur's Gate or Divinity: Original Sin. Early roughs for the longshoremen costumes. Some of these we discarded only after having modeled, textured and rigged, and animated the characters… Some character exploration sketches for the clerk at the Frittte (sic) kiosk. We considered multiple stylistic approaches for our character designs. This normal map texture for Kim Kitsuragi’s character model demonstrates our initial plan to paint all the characters’ normal maps by hand. Oftentimes an environment’s concept sketch isn’t something we’d try to impress our artist friends with. A side-by-side comparison of a render and a painted concept art piece of a game environment. In the end, the secret ingredient holding everything together stylistically is Aleksander Rostov’s beautiful bold brushwork. ![]() The exact level of detail to go for when painting inventory icons took a year or so of trying before we eventually settled on something. Rendering and painting the backgrounds went through a similar number of changes. I believe that the pipeline for character creation changed at least three or four times over the years. In what way did the art evolve with the project? Quadruple that to account for all the height maps, normal maps, and shadow maps for each painted one. I counted 193 squares of 4K resolution environment textures in the game. Having now met a number of video game artists from all over the world from studios both big and small I can say that compared to standard industry practices at times we had almost unprecedented artistic freedom.Ĭan you put any numbers on the scale of the project? There were times when we took cues from them and sometimes art would precede the writing – this allowed for great freedom in exploring our own ideas. During development, it was a friendly game of tug of war between us in the art corner and the writers in theirs. We’ve also been able to commission art from some really great artists. The core art team at ZA/UM consists of just a few hardcore art nerds who did the heavy lifting for Disco Elysium. Most people on the team got to try on multiple hats and sometimes that led us down a path either toward absolute disaster or an unexpected minor triumph.Ĭan you tell us how the art was created and by whom? Disco Elysium lead artist Aleksander Rostovįriendship and camaraderie are the best influences anyone could have. The failed experiments brought growth in other ways. I’d like to think we’ve been successful with some of these ‘improvements’. We looked at great games with a critical eye to try and improve on the well-established design solutions. We looked beyond games to bring the strange and the different. Think Jenny Saville, Alex Kanevsky, Sangram Majumdar, Iliya Repin, or Mikhail Vrubel. What influences (within or beyond games) did you draw from?įine art painters for one.
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