The Making of Disco Elysium - Part Five: Collapse

(Ambient music)

[DANNY] Hello! and welcome to the fifth episode in our series on Disco Elysium. As you likely know, the goal of our work here at NoClip is to shine a light on how games are created, so that players can get a better understanding of how their favorite game was made,

and so that other developers might learn from what went right and what went wrong. We just spent four episodes largely talking about what went right, but undercurrents of dissatisfaction and stress were only building as production moved forward.

Friction within the writing team would only increase when the decision was made to split them up between Estonia and the United Kingdom, but before that happened, the programming team – mostly folks who had never released a commercial game before – were having struggles of their own...

(Looming orchestral chords) [JAAGUP IRVE] I think the whole development room was being passively observant of the deadlines or feature creep.

It took a toll on us, of course, but on the other hand, it was also like, you could feel that the art team was making their greatest art that they could while we could do really mediocre programming because of that [laughs].

[ROBERT KURVITZ] The thought cabinet was done by Markus Rondo. I hear he didn't really like menus [laughs] at the end of that, and then he was a really, really cool programmer to work with.

A lot of the very basic movement stuff in the beginning of the game was done by Veljo Hagu, and then a lot of the cinematic programming was done by Mikk Luige.

Yuan Zhang, the VO producer who later pulled out the VO, came in to help with the sound and Andrus Laansalu, the sound engineer and designer, was still on the project.

[JAAGUP] We had more professional people arrive as well, like Ott, and also Liisi – my longtime friend from university – who is, I think, one of these remarkable programmers who can refactor huge things.

[ROBERT] Right near the ending stretch, we got what Irv called a hardcore progajada. "Progajada" is the programmer, but programmeress, in Estonian.

Liisi Laasik, who kind of became one of these lead programmer roles. And that was about the time when the game was becoming really big and feature complete, so she kind of took over the leadership of the team.