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Chapter 1: What inspired Patrick Ó Rian to transition from filmmaking to game writing?
Tech Talk with Jess Kelly.
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Rethink Renault. This is News Talk. Yeah, you're very welcome along to Tech Talk. This is Jess Kelly with you here on News Talk. Coming up over the next hour, we'll meet the Irishman who has swapped movie making for game writing and find out what goes into producing a big name title. Cork City Council's CIO will join me to explain the balance of innovation and responsibility when it comes to AI.
And as ever, I'll answer your tech questions immediately. If you want to get in touch, you can do so right now. TechTalk at Newstalk.com is the email address or you'll find me on Instagram at JessKellyNT. Last week on the show, John Reilly of TheEffect.net was with me. We reviewed the new Google Fitbit Air.
I'm going to have an update on my review of it a little bit later on because I wore it during the VHI Women's Mini Marathon event. And yeah, I have thoughts, I have notes. So we'll get to that a little bit later. But also while John was in last week, we were talking through some new gaming titles.
And for some people, they might roll their eyes when they hear people talk about gaming going, sure, look, it's just for kids. But that's not the case. The global gaming industry generates more revenue than movie, streaming and music combined.
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Chapter 2: How does storytelling in games differ from traditional filmmaking?
And it's valued at more than 320 billion euro. It is colossal. But one thing I've always been curious about is what goes into producing a big title game? Thankfully, I don't need to wonder anymore because Patrick O'Rean is with me now and he is the lead writer of Zero Parades for Dead Spies. Patrick, I'm delighted to talk to you.
Before we get into the game and how you got into this space, will you just tell us a little bit about your own background?
Yeah, no problem. Thanks, Jess, for having me on. So I started in film. I went to IDT after school and studied film production and film directing. and then did an MA in screenwriting.
And then I moved to games for this project with Zalm in 2022 after being taken with their first game, which is called Disco Elysium, which I think has a lot of the qualities that you were talking about there, a cinematic scope, a narrative which had never been seen in games before, at least I hadn't seen it, the kind of breadth and scope and depth of it. And that really intrigued me as to what's
might be possible in storytelling in games. And I thought at the time that we were maybe just entering the kind of period in the early 2000s when HBO were cranking out all those era-defining series in television. And I thought it was maybe very similar to that. So, yeah, I signed up and got in.
How... confident were you that the skills would transfer from filmmaking into game writing or writing for games because it's not necessarily an instant visible line in my head anyway no no it's i was maybe 30 confident i would say um
I think the basics, your kind of building blocks of storytelling are going to serve you well anywhere.
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Chapter 3: What is the overarching story of Zero Parades?
But there's a big difference between film and games. Games often last numerous hours. Our game is 25 hours to 30 hours and you won't even see everything in the game at that point. there was a concern about taking it into that kind of long form storytelling. That would have been my only hesitancy. But I thought, you know, the tools of storytelling would still be applicable.
And I did find that to be true once I got in there.
And so can you just give us a short synopsis then of the overarching story that this game tells? And then we can get into sort of the weeds a little bit more then.
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.
Oh, I love it. And did you sign up for this particular game? And is it the same as we'd hear about, say, on Screen Time, on John Fardy's movie podcast, where there's an initial blurb and there's certain talent signed to be part of it, but they're looking to flesh it out and so on? Is that the initial attraction or is it for the company itself?
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.
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Chapter 4: How long did it take to develop Zero Parades and what were the key stages?
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.
And so the approach to Zero Parades, how long was it in production? And can you bring us behind the scenes in terms of something like Zero Parades, how you go about it, how long it takes and the different steps?
Yeah, no problem. Sincera Parade's start to finish was almost four years to the day.
Wow.
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.
Wow. And explain to us from, because anyone who's played games like this will know that there's an element of kind of choose your own adventure, but you still go through certain steps to complete certain challenges or whatever it may be. How vast is the writing from your end, you know, in comparison to say a movie script or an episode of TV or something like that?
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.
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Chapter 5: What challenges arise in writing for a long-form game narrative?
And it's a process that is twisting, turning and ever evolving.
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.
Yeah, that is something that, and I've spoken about it in the past. So I love gaming, but there are certain games that I have tried to play and I get so frustrated because I can't do it. Even if I watch a YouTube tutorial, my little fingers just can't move fast enough or I just can't do it.
And you end up getting the hump and you walk away and you leave a game after, say, six hours of gameplay rather than going to fruition, which is a waste of time. It's a waste of money. And it is very frustrating. Is that in terms of the creative process, not only with yourself as a writer, but also from the technical team then as well?
Are they debates that happen in kind of a writer's room or a planning or production office?
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Chapter 6: How do game writers ensure player engagement and meaningful choices?
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
And are there Easter eggs within the game? You know, are there certain paths that only a tiny proportion of the people who play the game will find the game? Do you try and do that? Because I know that there are gaming nerds who love to play a game once, then they go at it again and try and find little Easter eggs.
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.
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.
I've read quite a few reviews of the game and almost every single review I have looked at has noted how well written it is and the story is engaging. I'm wondering, again, from the company's point of view,
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Chapter 7: What role does collaboration play in the development of a game like Zero Parades?
Is that something that, like it sounds like it is, that they truly seek out to do rather than just putting something that looks really nice out into the market and say, good luck, lads, enjoy yourselves?
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.
And let's talk about building the world from the writer's room and the production side of things, because what came first? Because I've seen images and stills from the game and it's beautiful. It's very artistic. When did you first see the images and the style of imagery that will be in this?
Was it chicken versus egg in terms of, you know, the world was built first and then you saw the images or vice versa?
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.
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Chapter 8: What advice does Patrick have for creatives looking to enter the tech industry?
At what stage did the gameplay, did the tech team get in to put your writing in action? And just talk me through a little bit of that process. Like, are you sitting over the shoulder of the tech team watching how and why they're doing things?
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. But again, at Zalm, I think the way other video games would work is you'd have a lot of design documentation and then everyone would work off that documentation. At Zalm, a lot of the proof of what we're doing is in the build of the game.
So the build of the game is what we call the game through its various stages. You work all the way up to release build.
So the programs are key in bringing that stuff to life early on so we can see how it plays and how it feels because what you write in the dialogue engine is going to be a totally different thing when you translate it to the actual build where you have the art and the environment. and the soundtrack and all that kind of stuff.
So the programmers are a kind of ally in that sense that they get everything together and allows us to see it. And then we can make kind of revisions and changes based on actually seeing it as the player will eventually, or at least, you know, kind of rough sketch of how the player will see it. Yeah.
You mentioned soundtrack there. And again, that just reinforces the way I've been thinking about some of these titles over the last wee while is that they are cinematic-esque productions. You know, you want the player to feel immersed in the world. You want them to feel different emotions at different points in games.
It does seem like that is the expectation now to ensure that, you know, it's not just how good the graphics look, it's the entire encapsulating experience. How important was that as well from a storyteller's point of view to make sure that you're tickling people's emotions in the right way?
Yeah, I think that's hugely important. And I think that goes back to what you said at the beginning, I think, where previously, you know, a game, the design of a game might have been just, you
or here's the arctic level and can you write something based on lava because we want to do something set in a volcano um and then you know everything would come from that kind of philosophy whereas in zelm everything from the writing to the music is integrated into an experience for the player so we're always kind of conscious of what story we're telling and we we collaborate hugely on that kind of
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