How Disco Elysium Was Made | Documentary

The story of how Disco Elysium was made, is one filled with lots of Dungeons and Dragons inspired game sessions, a very drunken night in Estonia, years of battling depression and alcoholism and eventually developing one of the best RPGs in recent times from an abandoned building. Disco Elysium’s inception goes all the way back to 2005 when Robert Kurvitz and his friends were having a fun, alcohol filled evening in Tallinn, the capital of their country Estonia. They began talking about how tired they were of being poor and ill-fated and decided to start a creative collective with the goal of making their artistic voices heard.

It would take at least another decade before making a video game was even remotely on their minds and instead kept busy producing books, music, poetry and paintings. Robert for example was the lead singer of a rock band called ‘Ultramelanhool’ for many years. During his off-time, he and the rest of the artistic group would all play a pen and paper role-playing game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. Robert and his friends came up with the pen and paper game and its many systems themselves, which had evolved over multiple years. It started from a bronze age setting and characters, to a more medieval setting and kept moving through historical periods from there. Finally, it landed on a modern day setting that would ultimately become the starting point for Disco Elysium’s world and characters.

The following years, Robert met two vital people that would later help him develop his dream project. The first one is Aleksander Rostov, who would ultimately become the art director for Disco Elysium. He was immediately impressed with some of the images of the characters and maps Robert and his friends used during their game sessions and saw an opportunity to expand on it. The second crucial person Robert met is Kaur Kender, a novelist who also understood the importance of business and advertising. Both Aleksander and Kaur quickly joined Robert’s group of creatives and in 2009, they officially named themselves ZA/UM, which in Russian, can be read as either ‘from the mind’ or ‘for the mind’.

Meanwhile, Robert was writing his very first novel titled ‘Sacred And Terrible Air’ and decided to have it take place in the pen and paper game world ZA/UM had fine tuned for quite some time now. After five dedicated years of hard work, the book was finally finished and featured art by Aleksander. Unfortunately, despite Kaur’s help to self-publish it, the novel only sold little over a 1000 copies. While it received positive reviews, it was by all accounts a commercial failure. Robert had not only thrown so much time into the novel, but also so much of himself. The book’s failure was a very personal and emotional experience that launched him into a deep depression, causing him to struggle with alcoholism.

His friend Kaur was there to help however. Kaur had dealt with alcoholism himself and Robert back then helped him overcome it. In order to return the favor, Kaur knew he needed to spark his friend’s creativity again with a crazy idea that would get the wheels turning. Funny enough, it was Kaur’s kids that generated the idea. “My kids were telling me, ‘Stop writing books! No one reads books! You should get into video games.’” And so, Kaur suggested developing a game together, set in the world ZA/UM had been creating for all these years.

Robert hadn’t considered making a video game until now and wasn’t really convinced of attempting something he might fail at yet again. “I wasn’t going to do a video game. I was thinking that we’d failed in enough things and I was just going to keep drinking.” Despite his negative mindset, he discussed the idea with Aleksander who instantly got excited to work on a game set in their beloved RPG world. His enthusiasm convinced Robert to at least give it a shot and wrote a one-page synopsis to communicate his vision for an innovative RPG. “AD&D meets ’70s cop-show, in an original ‘fantastic realist’ setting, with swords, guns and motor-cars. Realised as an isometric CRPG – a modern advancement on the legendary Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate. Massive, reactive story. Exploring a vast, poverty-stricken ghetto. Deep, strategic combat.”

Kaur vividly remembers reading the synopsis for the first time and imagining the massive potential it held. Now that the concept was taking shape, it was time to officially start development in 2014. Robert had regained his creative spirit after seeing Aleksander’s excitement over the project and decided to go all in once again. He completely sobered up and even gave up smoking. In order to become the best possible writer and designer he could be, he started exercising regularly, eating healthier and paying close attention to his anxiety levels.

Unfortunately, ZA/UM barely had any money to fund their project and zero experience with making games. To make matters worse, Estonia, at least at the time, only had one other game studio, meaning local talent was hard to come by. On top of that, they chose to create an RPG, which is perhaps the most difficult to develop. “The RPG is like the crown jewel, the most complicated thing to make. Everyone says you can’t QA it. An open-world RPG, are you insane? It just felt like it’s completely beyond any of our abilities, beyond anything we could do financially, even intellectually.”

The cards were stacked against ZA/UM, but Robert and the rest of the team had too much faith in the project and their abilities as artists to give up on the project now. They first took care of their financial situation. Kaur sold one of his most precious belongings, a Ferrari he had bought to one day hopefully drive it to the Cannes film festival to receive an award. Soon, they received more investments from friends and other people who were sold on a game with a massive open world and endless possibilities. To cut down on development costs as much as possible, the developers opted to work from an abandoned gallery in Tallinn. It not only provided plenty of space for the entire team, but it was also right next door to where Kaur lived.

The first year of development was focused on creating a distinct visual identity and developing storytelling mechanics. While Aleksander had already made some artwork for Robert’s novel, translating it to an interactive medium was a whole different ball game. To speed up the process and get in sync with each other, Robert and Aleksander worked in the same room so they could inspire each other. Robert got story ideas from seeing Aleksander’s art being drawn right in front of him, while Aleksander was able to paint scenes Robert had written minutes before.

Their teamwork paid off and the moment they saw one of Aleksander’s paintings depicting Revachol, the fictional city Disco Elysium primarily takes place in, they knew they had something special going. Those early explorative months were some of the best according to Aleksander. “I prided myself on my knowledge of video game history and how games have developed visually, and now I was in the position to be able to tap into these ideas and come up with a neat visual aesthetic in an actual game.”

Aleksander’s hand painted concept art was so good in fact, that ZA/UM decided to apply that kind of art style to the entire game. Everything you see in Disco Elysium has been expertly hand painted, giving it a unique look and feel that has this brush stroke quality to it. Backgrounds are pre-rendered and then painted over to achieve the right art style. 3D character models were enhanced by hand painting brush strokes onto the normal maps, which are a kind of texture to add surface detail, so they would fit in better alongside the backgrounds. Additionally, it was important that the art style reflected the subjectivity of the story. A lot of what happens during the game is told through the inner monologue of the main character so a more contemporary art style, something that’s more subjective, was more fitting than a realistic art style. Aleksander also described the project as a game of portraits. The player visits many homes of various NPCs and each home is decorated with interesting little details that give more insight into the inhabitant. Like a self-portrait if you will.

Inspiration for ZA/UM’s first ever game project came from multiple sources and mediums. The developers are big fans of isometric RPGs and RPGs in general, but Robert always specifically liked the detective missions in games like Baldur’s Gate 2 and The Witcher series. That’s why the team went on this path to create a detective RPG, where every mission is basically a mystery the player has to solve with little combat involved and instead focus more on the story and character interactions. Helen Hindpere, one of the main writers, said TV shows like The Wire, where there’s a big focus on the neighbourhood, were also a great inspiration for the game’s locations and how characters behave. Émile Zola, a French novelist among other occupations, influenced a lot of the story’s dour and depressing atmosphere. Helen mentioned she thinks it’s important to talk about and show the misery of human life, because it makes you feel less alone when you discover yourself in that situation. Furthermore, some of the developers were also influenced by Estonian punk bands that they listened to growing up, that had heavy, politically inspired lyrics.

One of the first ideas they had for Disco Elysium is a mechanic called the Thought Cabinet and was born from trying to come up with a way to reward players with anything other than more traditional RPG items like ammo and potions. See, the story of Disco Elysium simply doesn’t require the player to constantly be killing people and picking up loot, so ZA/UM needed to come up with something else for the player to collect and get a sense of progression and satisfaction. The team describes the Thought Cabinet as an inventory for your thoughts and ideas that can be used to progress missions, discover more possibilities and further shape the protagonist. It’s probably the feature that’s been talked about the most by reviewers and fans of the game. Which is no surprise, since it’s the central feature that influences other parts of the gameplay. The game’s locations are rich with thoughts to collect from having conversations with NPC’s and once you’ve collected a thought, it can be equipped and grown over time to increase certain skills. As a result, each time you play you can develop a different type of character with completely different ideas and personality traits.

The thought cabinet went through many many iterations and therefore Robert calls it a typical quagmire feature, which in game development is a feature that’s always one refinement away from being perfect. Because of this, it keeps swallowing more and more money and time according to Robert, who said the feature almost destroyed the game’s development because of those exact consequences. However, it’s a feature that’s also essential to the gameplay so you can’t just dump it during development. One of the major problems of the Thought Cabinet was its design. Robert explained that such a feature had never been done before in video games so there were no examples to borrow elements from, no past mistakes to learn from. The menu needed to be intuitive and fun to use, since players will be spending a lot of time staring at it. All the illustrations that represent the thoughts were made by concept artist Anton Vill and it took him about a full year of dedicated work to perfect them.

People that have played Disco Elysium, know a lot of time is spent, simply reading text so ZA/UM devoted a huge amount of time creating a dynamic dialogue system that was easy to use and understand. One of the things they discovered is that it’s best to place the main textbox on the right of the screen, rather than in the lower middle where you lose a lot of real estate on the screen. Robert explained to Gamespot that people are used to looking at the bottom right corner on their computer screen, because usually that’s where your clock is, your messages, and so on. It’s also where your right hand is and so where your computer mouse is, said Robert. Therefore, ZA/UM placed their text box on the right and had text appear from the bottom going up.

Afterwards, they began looking at how other text display systems work and what makes them so appealing. The developers realized that a lot of people say they don’t want to read text because it’s boring so they needed to find a way to make reading fun and addictive. Surprisingly, Twitter is the one display system that stood out the most during their research and the team believes the social media platform has perhaps the most snappy, fast and involving display system. For instance, it’s no coincidence Twitter has column shaped text boxes. It’s one of the best ways to present text and is often used on digital platforms and also physical displays such as newspapers. The intuitive way you scroll through text and the fast and snappy controls made Twitter their main inspiration, which is clearly visible when you look at Disco Elysium’s final dialogue system.

When it came to the text itself and the meaning of it, Robert knew he had to make it as punchy and as personal as possible to keep players focused on the screen. It’s for this reason the game is as confrontational as it is with its characters and storylines. This links back to social media as well, because platforms like Facebook and Twitter are aggressive in nature and always fighting for your attention. It can be a nasty psychological environment, but ZA/UM made sure not to copy that aspect of social media. Instead, the developers focused more on keeping the text personal and engaging by having different skills that can talk to the player during dialogue scenes.

Disco Elysium has 24 skills in total that all have different opinions about any given situation the player finds themselves in. That many different skills, that also vary in level based on what players choose to upgrade, meant the devs needed to write an almost absurd amount of text for every scene that can have multiple outcomes and possibilities. Robert described it as a “hellish” experience to set up the right structures for such a system to work and while it might seem like overkill to have that much input and perspectives, he assured it was done for a very good reason. “The main thing to understand about text, is that people don’t understand text. They don’t understand what you’re telling them, unless you’ve told it to them two, three, four, sometimes even eight different ways. But if you do not understand what is happening, then it’s not interesting to you. You don’t understand what’s at stake.”

In other words, the more information and context you have, the more exciting each choice you make becomes. Unsurprisingly, the dialogue system required a lot of tweaking and optimisation to find that sweet spot of dealing out a lot of context without overloading the player with information. Robert mentioned ZA/UM always intended to make a very mainstream product for a broad audience so every word was carefully chosen to make every sentence as clear and comprehensible as possible. That same kind of care was also applied to the programming and animation. The studio chose to develop the game with Unity and created animations based on real footage of natural body language to get all the small, intricate gestures right that you might otherwise miss. To avoid things looking wrong or weird in the isometric perspective, the writers, designers and animators worked closely with each other to provide constant feedback.

With a more defined visual identity and a solid dialogue system to tell its story, the game was making good progress. At this point in time, the developers were still working from their abandoned gallery in Tallinn, but things started to take a turn in 2016 when they were able to secure its first round of venture capital after officially founding their game development studio. ZA/UM used part of the money to hire a band called British Sea Power to create the game’s soundtrack. This led to a meeting between the studio and the band in Birmingham (mention Birmingham UK) and it almost immediately felt like home to Robert and the rest of the team. Aside from this immediate connection, the UK was rich with opportunities and talented developers that could help turn Disco Elysium into something even greater. What’s more, the team also thought that marketing their game, let alone continuing developing it, from Estonia would have been very difficult. “It’s a mental situation, it’s not really good for doing creative work because the whole time you feel that actually you should be digging something, or practising your shooting, or preparing for war. It’s not really a video game-friendly situation. In London it’s so much easier.”

Around this time, ZA/UM’s project went by the title “No Truce With the Furies” and while the team initially wanted to create a huge sprawling open world, it became clear they would need to scale it down by a lot or risk running out of money fairly quickly. The big open world was replaced with a much more intimate location that was the size of a small town and it was this version of the game that was announced in March 2017. It was supposed to come out that same year, but as things progressed and ZA/UM started to get more funds and hired more people, the scope of the project increased once again, leading to a delay. What’s more, some of the core staff were also busy moving from Estonia to the UK.

As more and more developers came onboard, it became increasingly difficult to manage what all the writers were adding to the story and characters, since no less than 10 writers were simultaneously working on the game in the later stages of development. Luckily, they discovered a software tool called Articy that offers a robust templating system, support for cooperative editing and a flexible interface that makes handling “complex, branching, Lovecraftian-looking, monstrous dialogue trees”, as Robert described it, manageable.

Speaking of complex dialogue trees, the team wanted to give players as much freedom as possible in pursuing ideas and thoughts, no matter how dark and controversial they might turn out to be. Some situations in the game are so dark in fact, that the game’s editors advised the devs to take them out. Robert said in an interview with GameAnalytics that they don’t care about leaving a good impression of themselves as writers, but rather focus on entertaining and accommodating the player at any cost. Disco Elysium is all about player choice and trusting the player to solve missions any way they want, in any order they want. So you can go on a really dark and twisted path, but you don’t have to.

In 2018, ZA/UM officially reintroduced their RPG as Disco Elysium. Its previous name “No Truce With the Furies” was always intended as a placeholder name and was only used to promote the game early in development before the team had found the perfect title. Robert wanted the new name to be no longer than three words. Of course, it also had to be memorable and wholly unique. In other words, if you type it into Google, it has to be the first result you see. When dissecting the title, the “Disco” part is meant to reflect the protagonist and this comparison becomes more clear as you get to know the character. Disco also means “I learn” in Latin. Elysium is the world the game takes place in, therefore “I learn Elysium”.

After five challenging years and thanks to over a 100 talented contributors from all over the world, Disco Elysium was released on October 15th, 2019 for PC and received universal praise. Its story and dialogue system especially took gamers by surprise at how well everything was thought out and how much freedom you have as a player. The quality of the writing itself was also highlighted by multiple reviews. ZA/UM had more than succeeded in their hopes of creating an innovative CRPG that relies mostly on story, exploration and dialogue. To underline their artistic achievement, ZA/UM won multiple awards for Disco Elysium, most notably in 2019 at The Game Awards, where it was nominated for four awards and managed to win all four. No other game that day was able to match or surpass that achievement.

After release, it quickly became the top selling game on Steam as well and after a year, the game managed to sell over a million copies. Now that ZA/UM was not only a well respected studio in the game industry, but also made quite some profit with Disco Elysium, the team set out to make their game even better and began working on an expanded version called The Final Cut. It was first announced at The Game Awards in 2020 and features voice acting for every piece of dialogue, more quests, more animations and so on. The addition of voiceovers for all the dialogue was by far the most difficult part to accomplish, since over 1,2 million words needed to be recorded by multiple voice actors around the world. It took no less than 14 months to get the job done. The developers intended to include all this extra content in the original version, but dropped it in favor of getting the game out the door sooner.

What’s interesting about The Final Cut’s release is that the Classification Board of Australia refused to give the game any kind of rating, effectively banning it across the entire country. The board simply didn’t like the game’s depiction of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, and violence and clarified that Disco Elysium more than crossed a certain rule that’s about “revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency, and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults.” The ban was quickly overturned however when the Classification Review Board, a separate body that looks at cases that have been challenged, in this case by ZA/UM, decided to give The Final Cut an 18+ rating. While the game lets players use drugs to gain instant short-term benefits, more general and long-term drug use has negative consequences for the player’s progression and that part of the gameplay was key in influencing the review board’s decision.

Disco Elysium’s development is a good example of achieving your goals against all odds, no matter where you’re from. Sure, they had plenty of great ideas, but at the start none of the team members had any experience with game design, nor did they have any money. At least not until they started selling personal belongings. On top of that, developing a game in Estonia wasn’t an ideal situation to begin with. In the end, it was the trust between the people at ZA/UM that made the impossible possible. “I’m incredibly happy for this. To work on something like this with other people giving seven thousand percent – safe in the knowledge that they have your back and aren’t ruining things – to trust their judgement completely. It’s pretty cool.”

ZA/UM’s future is looking bright. Now that they’ve proven themselves with Disco Elysium, the game industry is closely anticipating what the studio is going to do next. Members of the team have already hinted during interviews that ZA/UM is planning on expanding the Disco Elysium universe and that a big sequel is very likely to happen. Additionally, there’s already a television series in the works based on the game and Robert is also working on an English translation of his first novel Sacred and Terrible Air that’s set in the world of Elysium.

Despite all of his success, Robert told the following to GameAnalytics when asked about advice for aspiring developers and how they can start their own studio. “Don’t do it. Just do something normal with your life. Go work first, go to a studio that’s already there, that’s already nice and produced. Don’t make your own studio. My second suggestion would be that if you absolutely, totally feel like you’re going to be a bum, that you’re not going to pay your rent and you’re going to lose your apartment and you have to do something, and then your friends happen to want to make a video game – as it was in my case – if it feels like an existential must and you will die if you don’t make it… then definitely do it, because it’s very much possible, I think. You have to be really… it has to be scary how much you want to do it, because it’s very hard.”