Disco Pre-lysium

If Disco Elysium was prototyped today.

In this exercise, I'll simulate the planning stage of Disco Elysium using a variety of prototyping techniques:

• wireframing
• sketching
• narrative prototyping

wireframing

Here we try a bunch of screen layouts, colour-coded as follows:

• dialogue
• inventory
• world

wireframing

On the left, we split gameplay and conversation down the middle, but it feels like we're giving too much space to the conversation. We try to make it smaller, but is it too small?

• dialogue
• inventory
• world

wireframing

Let's try thirds. That looks nice. OK, how about inventory? On the left below gameplay, or on the right below the conversation?

• dialogue
• inventory
• world

wireframing

Definitely below conversation, so we can have a nice, large gameplay area. But let's not be all squares. How about a trapezoid? And a ...bit... more space for conversation. OK, that looks good.

• dialogue
• inventory
• world

wireframing

Right, that's a good layout. Let's see some rough concept art in it, shall we?

sketching

Dark and gritty, just like the protagonist.

OK, stop. I know this is based on my novel and all, but is there a way we can test the dialogue before we spend LOADS of time drawing stuff and coding something?

I mean, we already spent LOADS of time on the wireframes...

narrative prototyping

You mean this?

narrative prototyping

This next section is Copyright © Alexei Pepers / @ampepers

Don't skip ahead. Click the red Continue button to follow the story...

FIN