Patrick Ó Rian

Yeah, so Zero Parades is an RPG where you play as a disgraced spy called Hershel Wilke, whose alias is Cascade.

And five years previous, Cascade led a spy network to absolute ruin in a city state called Portofiero.

And when the story picks up, it sees her

return to this city with a new mission, a new assignment, which means she has to reunite her old assets, some of whom don't like her very much anymore, and prove she's still got it and get the band back together and play one last show to prove she still has it.

And whether she does or not is the business of the player.

For me, it was to work with the people who had produced this game that I thought was pretty groundbreaking.

I was interested to get in with them and see how they thought and see how they wrote.

So when I answered the job spec, it was like for, not for a project in particular, but it was to work with them on their next thing, which then turned out to be Zero Parades.

Yeah, no problem.

Sincera Parade's start to finish was almost four years to the day.

So it started in June, July 2022, and it was released just in May, May the 21st on Steam.

Although it is still going on because we're planning a PlayStation 5 release later in the year.

So I suppose development is still ongoing.

But the main game was, yeah, four years, almost day to day.

It's pretty vast and the trick is to try and make everything that you're encountering in the game meaningful and connected with other things that are happening in the game.

With a film it's two hours that you can keep the string fairly taut over that time limit, or at least you should aim for that.

it's a lot harder over a long form to do that um so the real trick and where we spend the most time is kind of pulling everything together because the way you break down a story like this is into into quests so it's as you say it's going to choose your own adventure choose your own path but the story is kind of railroaded in like you're going to get from a to b and how you get from a to b is kind of the pro view of the player

But we want to take you from one point to another.

And the unit of measurement, I suppose you call it, within that are the quests, the quest lines, which are kind of individual stories, short stories in and of themselves.

And the idea is that then they link together to form this kind of overarching story over the game's runtime.