Disco Elysium is one crazy-good CRPG. And one of its strongest points is how it lays out the text, be it descriptions or dialogue choices, that makes you feel engaged.
Robert Kurvitz, lead designer and writer of Disco Elysium, breaks down the game’s dialogue box, among many other game features, on Gamespot’s Audio Logs show.
CRPGs usually have the text and dialogue box on the lower third of the screen, and for Disco Elysium it’s very early on that the developers decided to not do that. Instead, it’s placed near the bottom right side, oriented vertically. Similar to Harebrained Scheme’s Shadowrun Returns, which used this layout.
“If you’re using a computer, [the bottom right side of the screen] is where you look 60 percent of the time,” Kurvitz explains in the video. “The screen weight is always at the bottom right corner. This is where your clock is. Where your tray is. Where your messages are.”
This comes from a trait that humans tend to look at the lower right, where the right hand is.
Another unlikely source of inspiration for Disco Elysium’s text box design is social media. Namely, Twitter.
“Twitter was our, kind of, competition. As a writer, you want to write snappy, fast, evolving text. You want to display it in as good as a manner as you can. And Twitter does it very well.”
That inspiration resulted in the text box being formatted as a column that tumbles up, like how you scroll through Twitter. “We want to build a dialogue engine that as addictive and as snappy as Twitter, which I guess is a strange thing to say for an RPG,” Kurvitz said.
And the inspiration didn’t end there too. The team also took note of how confrontational interactions can be on social media in general, which affected Disco’s writing as well. The skill points that also speak to you, like a party member chiming in their opinion, which hones down the current stake of a conversation or interaction.
The Audio Logs feature is a good watch. Kurvitz goes in length on the Thought Cabinet, a super-cool mechanic in which he describes it as a “Quagmire feature”- a feature that’s close to being what it is, but kept sinking development costs.
Disco Elysium is out now on PC via Steam.