Patrick Ó Rian

Yeah, there's certainly a lot of that.

Constantly reviewing, revising, playing, seeing where you can make things tighter or kind of integrate more with another quest or where things fall apart.

You know, we're always trying to avoid

dead ends where the player can walk themselves into a soft lock, as we call it, and get stuck in the game.

So you've got to kind of test every single route.

We also have this design philosophy at Zalman with Zero Parades in particular, which is like fail forward.

So traditionally in the game, you would choose the wrong thing or you'd go down the wrong path and that would be a game over and you'd have to restart from...

a previous save or a previous point in the game.

We don't want to do that at all.

We want people to move forward even when they fail, which of course takes another layer of planning and kind of, yeah, vouchsafing, I suppose.

Yes, for sure.

In the writer's room, there is a lot of talk about how we get a player out of this and how we can make it feel rewarding even when you fail, you know, to avoid exactly the kind of feeling you're describing there.

And then it lets the players kind of own their playthrough as well and own their character, which is an important part of these games also.

And then when you're talking about it with other people, you say, well, my

place where I did this but then I failed this and that led me to this and that can be totally different but the ideal is that it's totally different to the way another person has experienced it but all that does take a lot of planning and that's like the business of once the plot and the themes and the characters are sorted through and that's the kind of real shoulder to wheel work in the writer's room yeah

Yes, there are.

There are certainly those little world pools that you can get into that you can

feel like maybe you're the only person who has found this.

At least that's the feeling we try and cultivate in players.

And that's part of the trick of the game is that obviously the game has limitations.