Disco Elysium

Does anyone know what programming language was used to make Disco Elysium?
I don’t mean the part of animated graphic RPG, but the management of the textual dialogues.

Thanks!

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There’s an interview at https://www.articy.com/en/showcase/disco-elysium/ which indicates that they used Articy as a planning tool. That’s not a programming language, but it lets you specify a lot of the same scene logic stuff.

As far as I’ve heard, the programming was a custom (in-house) engine.

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Thanks Andrew, nice to know!

  • Marco.
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My cousin told me about Disco Elysium this summer, and it just became available on Playstation Plus as a free game, so I started playing it. And I played it. And I recognized it as interactive fiction, and in fact, a lot of writing and the advances since 20 or 15 or 10 or 5 years ago, in just the text-part of Disco Elysium, as Interactive Fiction. And it’s a lot of writing. And it’s remarkable and wonderful. And, unfortunately for us in the text-only camp 20 years ago, it’s every advance and it’s got a huge graphic component that is not to be dismissed.

Realisticallly, IF can’t compete with complete Unity IF-in-a-sidebar + complete graphic design and art. But I feel like I’m playing the advancement in the text-box of the art, continguous from when I was really invested in the state of the art.

Rob

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I haven’t played it myself, but I know there are people in the IF community who say that, in terms of important mechanics, the graphics are irrelevant and DE is almost equivalent to a text-only game.

It has a whole RPG part, and a card-game part, of 60 stats you can level-up. That change your interactions. And, on the fly, you can try to beef them up. And you see it, you get new dialogue choices. And, you get new dice roll modifiers.

I don’t like the dice roll thing. I never liked it, I still don’t like this RPG Gygax holdover. One figures out eventually to quicksave and then do all the dialogue choices to do the roll again, and you get a favorable one, could we get over the die roll thing. I hate it as an old Gen X guy who doesn’t like the curve up to and off of 7s. It’s literally craps.

Rob

I achingly see descriptions of doors opening, and I know this is where IF was always going. And I’m faffing around changing the outfits on my avatar, which is never where IF was going. I read paragraphs of text, suggested by my 60 different RPG/card stats, which are actually really helpful, because it’s all about the IF work on making different text appear and have an effect on our choices, our choices, not just our choice menus, but our choices, as we go along and make our choices. It’s absolutely great at that. I think we should have pooled our authors better, and we would have invented exactly this.

But we would only have invented the text window bits of this graphical game. And even I like the graphical part. Except the interface at times drove me crazy. Mental, with rage.

The text, as far as I’ve seen it. In that box, that is there. Interactive Fiction. Disco Elysium

Rob

I believe I read, and I might be remembering this incorrectly, that DE grew out of a DnD world and then was developed through stages of increasing complexity and interactivity into the game we now know.

I would not be surprised to find that one scrapped stage of that development was a choice/parser style adventure. The text and mechanics very much read that way.

What I know for certain is that it’s fantastic.

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There’s an engine that mimic the narrative RPG system of Disco Elysium. It is called Narrat, it is free, it is awesome, and I like it:

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Thank you, that’s a great find!

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I wouldn’t say the graphics are irrelevant. But there’s nothing they achieve with the 3D system that they couldn’t have done with a simpler 2D interface.

I think the game benefits very much from the pictorial illustrations of the characters. Also the art style gives an extra dimension to the exploration of the environment.

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there’s actually a lore bit in game about a failed interactive fiction (in all but name) video game studio that was too ambitious and crashed and burned, and a lot of the commentary seems to be the devs poking fun at themselves

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There is, that’s right!

Amongst the other thousand threads I’d forgotten all about that. Well remembered.

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I agree, the presentation of the world is uncucumberable to the experience.

The very same happens with Kentucky Route Zero. They are not simply Interactive Fiction, the graphics are essential to their nature.

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Thanks everyone who replied, acknowledging that this is a great IF game, hidden in a great graphical game.

Rob

I should tag as an epilogue, that the game passive-aggressively tagged me with a “Boring as f**k” Achievement, and literally had the game tell me, OK, you seem like you’re just a boring old guy playing the game to solve all the puzzles, and catch the murderer and finish the case. FINE. And then that’s the ending I got.

Guilty as charged. I was also a superstar, who espoused both right-fascist and left-communist views, and never committed to either of them. In other words, Super Boring.

Rob

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(and, I kept the character sober)

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There’s a guy who yells HARDCORE. At a certain point, again, the game seems to be just going into parentheses for people like me. It says, he’s a Puzzle. This guy’s dialogue is a Maze. Do you – oh, you’re already on it, it’s dialogue, so the number of branches is — oh ok. You solved it.

I am curious about this admission in the text of the game. I am also reminded of Admiral Jota rolling up his sleeves and solving the “maze” in First Things First by dropping items in all rooms with no object dropped, and happily solving it because I was kind enough not to cheat him on this being the solution. It had never occurred to me to cheat it.

So, about this HARDCORE guy, the game admits: Puzzle, for those inclined. And I almost got it the first time. Then I tried all the other paths, came back to the point where I almost got it, and then I had a small tree to solve it.

Rob

I played it through twice in a row, once as a gig economy dirtbag and once as a communist. The communist was a psyche/inland empire character, what a ride. Dirtbag was intellect/motorics.

I think following the cryptozoologist storyline (they’re in the bar, this isn’t a secret) was my favorite thing, but it’s really hard to settle on just one favorite.

I think it’s IF, too. At bare minimum, it could only exist in a world where IF exists. Possibly my favorite commercial game this century, if not, top five.

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I’m not disagreeing with you, but I’ve always thought the more direct line was “…a world where Planescape Torment exists, and then everyone spent twenty years internalizing the lessons from that.”

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