Patrick Ó Rian

It has these invisible walls where we haven't thought through every single possibility because we'd still be working at it and it would take too long.

But we kind of want to give the impression that it's limitless, that you could do anything in it.

And that's where I think the sense of wonder of these kind of CRPG games come from.

And that's very much forefront of our minds when we're designing it, yeah.

Absolutely, they do.

And I think

that, yeah, Zalm is a narrative first studio.

Doesn't mean the writers direct the project, but it does mean we keep narrative across all the disciplines at the forefront of our kind of creative minds.

And it is hugely important

must say the writers were given so much freedom to really sit with the story and break it down and then reset it and then break it again and a lot of our crazier ideas made it into the games you know there weren't a lot of guardrails in terms of what we were what we could get in and what we what we wanted to get in which is very freeing and i think especially on a

in a multi-international project like this, quite rare, I would say.

So absolutely, narrative is at the forefront of everything we do in Xelm, yeah.

I think the broad kind of outline came from the writer's room first about the story and what kind of genre we'd be working in.

But the art and the explorations followed very soon after that.

And I think that is one of the advantages of working in a studio with many creative, talented people is that things kind of compound and inspire each other.

So the world building certainly was not...

um completely writer-led and in place that was and then just handed over to the art department it kind of evolved in tandem and we were definitely taking cues and inspiration from the drawings that the art team would come up with and the paintings and and uh some of the character sketches and then that was kind of feeding back into the world building work that we were doing on the writing side so it was a very collaborative uh process i would say zaum is very collaborative in that way as well which also maybe is

from like the ground up.

I am certainly not because I am not tech minded in that way at all.

And we have a lot of very talented programmers who are.