[Image description: Two portraits in the style of Disco Elysium of Ryland Grace and Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Grace looks down towards the viewer with an anxious expression, his glasses hanging off his face, an abstracted foggy beach in the background and the Hail Mary shadowing him. Rocky is in his xenonite ball with two arms raised, the Blip-A in space behind him. End ID]

Errh, these are probably too detailed to be TRUE DE-style. But it's whatever xP I'm addicted to making these...

By all means, de is about hope, and pulling yourself from the darkest hole, in spite of the hopelessness that permeates the world.

But I think it's important to engage, intellectually, with the actual writing of the game, its themes, and what it has to say about Harry's positionality, about the police, about the people of this town who are trying to survive under oppressive systems.

People don't talk back to you because you're a cop in the middle of a literal mercenary assault on a small working town, and you've spent the past few days threatening to kill people and yourself. People are terrified of what would happen if you killed a union member, a company rep, or yourself (a cop whose death would be investigated).

People don't expect anything of you because you are protected by the entire cop apparatus -except that within that apparatus things are actually expected of you, and the other police employees spend the whole game degrading you, neglecting your health, and generally painting a good picture of how you ended up with retrograde amnesia in the first place.

Yes Kim grows fond of you, but he also cleans up your messes and enables you because he is a gay & racialized cop whose status within the police is, of his own admission, extremely precarious. You are white and you can pull rank on him to such an extent that even if he wanted to, he wouldn't be able to get upset at you without consequences on his career. He never has the ability to meaningfully stand up to you, even if you spend the entire game being extremely racist and calling him a slur. There is even a line that indicates he was tense before reading your kill count, because he expected it to be much higher.

"You have a gun" -like this is a harmless, fun fantasy. Your gun is a source of chaos and terror for the entire game.

"Initially, the church wasn't a focal point. There were certain characters that needed to visit this location, and I asked, "Seriously, what do we have in our church?" The others replied, "Nothing at all. Our church is completely bare—just a wheel, really. It's quite basic."

That's when I decided to unleash my creativity in the design. For example, they chose to install a glass structure at the top of the church to create a reflective surface. It was like placing an optical clock up there. Therefore, one of the most crucial aspects of designing the church was ensuring the lighting was just right to create the desired atmosphere."

"Let me show you an example of Baroque architecture, which is rich in detail. We're also designing the interior of the church based on large cathedrals. However, the foundation you use might not yield the expected results, because the church itself doesn't require such intricate details. Sometimes, it's about simplifying the design."

"I used Articy for the initial scriptwriting of Disco Elysium. The image only represents a tiny fraction of the text and choice variables involved. This system was also the reason I eventually abandoned the project after a year of outlining the script and shifted my focus to becoming a sound designer. My mind struggled to keep up with the dynamic graphic rules, but fortunately, a more talented writer took over afterward."

"In terms of sound design, it's essential to develop different layers to bring out the charm of the church as a cohesive space. Although this represents only a small portion of the overall design, each layer actually requires a significant amount of time to compose the whole....... Whenever there's a shift or a change due to the dialogue itself, you need to adjust the background sounds. Each time you modify the details in the dialogue, I have to refine the background audio, ensuring that these elements build upon each other like an intricate layer of work."

"It's funny how many scenes involve characters getting smacked in the face. My job was to recreate those, so I locked myself in the bathroom with a recorder and hit my forehead until it turned red.

As a sound designer, I really dig those unsettling, drill-like sounds. So, I mixed in creepy lectures, metal scraping, moans, and cries of pain—because I just love that stuff! (laughs)

Players will be moving through all kinds of areas, so it's super important to make the sound transitions feel natural, trying to create a more immersive vibe in certain spaces.

With all the scenes featuring big cranes, you can hear them from far away, and I wanted to capture that eerie ringing in your ears. That's going to be a thing throughout most of the game. I've found ways to really mess with players while they're playing!"

"I've come across a lot of old objects (like phones and radios) that I needed to perfectly replicate the sounds. I started to become a bit of a hoarder, buying up different models of old phones whenever I found one to add to my collection. The sound effects I can simulate from them are really impressive."

"Some of the devices don't actually exist in real life—just a mix of architecture and tech. When I need to create sound effects, I first look for something similar that exists in our world, then I try to simulate what the sound and appearance of that thing might have been like a century ago.

Towards the end of the game, there's a character carrying a fuel canister. We needed the sound of the canister, so we dug one up from our garage—it had been sitting there since he was five! I realized this would make the sound perfect. So, it had been there for 50 years, and after 40 years, it finally found its purpose.

In some places, I needed unique sound waves, and recreating them was a real headache until one day I happened to walk by a swimming pool and stumbled upon an old wartime torpedo. You can rotate the torpedo's probe, and it slowly rises up, like a proud zombie head. The sounds it made were exactly what I needed!"

🙋How did you manage to get funding?

"Well, since we're in Estonia, you just need to know a wealthy person. You don't need five people—just two who can network, hang out together, and convince them to keep investing! (laughs) Back then, we constantly ran out of money and would tell them, 'Oops, looks like we spent it all! Can you invest a bit more?' That's how we made it through!"

🙋How did you all come together to make the game?

"Luck. It usually doesn't happen this way, and that's the key difference. It has to be. If not, you couldn't create a game of this scale - well, I mean in terms of budget. But creatively, Estonia definitely has writers and artists who can pull it off. With such a small population, there are a lot of quirky folks who are good friends. We were really lucky, though - lots of fortunate circumstances came together. It brought the right people together, allowing those talented fools to collaborate with us. They had experience but hadn't tackled projects of this magnitude before. So yeah, luck is pretty important!"

Hey, here's the full set of the brand new Disco Elysium pics!

Prints are available, and maybe these work well in poster format (which inprnt started doing a while ago)?

I'm sad I didn't get to draw any cars, would be nice to do 1 more, but I need to move on... Also, there has been a promo on all summer at inprnt that might end soon, so these are at 35% off right now!