Welcome back, folks. While we are still hard at work on the Vertical Slice under the sweltering heat of this early summer, we managed to find some time to reveal two new skills : Lost Motorway and Liber de Martinaise.
Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but there might be something interesting if you read through the entire devlog. Or skip to the end. But that would not be cool.
DRIVE ALL-TERRAIN
We welcome returning interviewees Sab, the Creator, Lieutenant Zero-Yefreitor Duyton, and Project Apparatchik Tina who will enlighten us on the creation process and ideas behind this addition to the voices in your head.
Q : What exactly is Lost Motorway? What base DE skills does it resemble most, and how does it differ?
Tina : Lost Motorway is one of the most distinctively DCA concepts in the whole skill set – it doesn’t really have a near-analogue in Disco Elysium. Functionally and spiritually, its closest DE relative is Inland Empire. Tonally, it’s closest to Shivers. Overall, Lost Motorway is far more personal than either of them
When this skill fires, it’s DCA’s body recognizing and experiencing the Pale as a physical phenomenon.
We want players to feel what Pale overexposure has done to DCA – specifically to his sense of his own past. Lost Motorway knows the ways his life has twisted and turned, how dark the road, and where he could have eased up and taken an off-ramp but slammed the gas pedal instead.
Our current description (probably not final) reads:
Cool for: The Untethered, Veterans of the Long Crossings, Anyone Who Has Been Lost and Kept Going Anyway
The road stretches back further than you remember. Further than you can see. Something happened at mile marker 24. Every off-ramp you didn’t take is still out there. In the right light, you can almost see where they led.
At high levels, you find things in the Pale that have no business still existing. Some of them are yours.
At low levels, the engine stalls. You are here now, only with no sense of the distance traveled.
Lost Motorway isn’t navigable by intellect, that’s why it’s an FYS (Physique) skill. FYS is perception rooted in the body, in physical self-knowledge, in *proprioception.*
Q : How did you come up with its design?
Sab : Usually we’re trying to stray away from literal associations between skill name and skill’s appearance, but for this instance it was just way too tempting. We were looking for a way to invoke a “road to nowhere” type of vibe, so it needed to be both hollow and personal.
Tina: With DCA’s history, the skill had to capture transience, potential, and freedom (of the liberating and terrifying kind).
Early designs for Lost Motorway
Sab : From that point onward I asked Duyton for further assistance with the design.
Duyton : Sab asked me for help polishing up the first draft of the portrait, and I wanted to make it slightly more visceral. In my head, the first renditions looked too structural in nature as a literal brick tunnel. We tinkered with having it look like a homeless man’s physique — one sketch being fleshy and soft and the other being bony and hard. Ultimately, we chose bones.
The tunnel’s bricks were morphed into something almost like a gaping set of teeth, or a ribcage, with fleshy moss hanging down.
We liked how it looked old and mysterious, since this skill leans on the cryptic and inexplicable side.
Tina: It also resembles a gaping hole blown through someone’s chest.
None know where the Lost Motorway leads. It’s in the name.
Sab : A lot of artwork made for DCA ends up being a cooperative project, which makes it hard to have one artist talk about their experiences alone with the piece they worked on. We’re pretty open to cooperation.
LIBER, JOHNNY, LIBER
Tina returns in this second interview to complete the words of Cer, Child Art Prodigy and Actual Thought Leader, and talk about our second skill for today: Liber de Martinaise.
Q : How would you describe this skill to our readers?
Tina : Liber de Martinaise is the local knowledge voice, but as far as style and function, the closest relatives in DE are Encyclopedia and Visual Calculus. Here’s our current (maybe not final) description:
Every place you’ve ever been left something behind. So did you.
Cool for: Urban Explorers, Full-Time Trespassers.
History lives in crumbling facades, salt-stained docks, and the way a neighborhood smells when the money left a long time ago. Liber de Martinaise allows you to read places, to translate the unspoken language of the streets and the cryptic symbology of the homeless.
At high levels, people have less room to deceive you about local matters and more room to be understood on their own terms.
At low levels, places are just places, people are just people, and you are just another drifter, passing through.
Q : How does it function in play?
Tina : Sites around the map can trigger familiar cinematic flashes, highlighting elements on the map that allow DCA to analyze locations the way Visual Calculus allows Harry to analyze crime scenes.
Q : How did Liber go from your wrinkly brain to the straight page?
Cer : I did most of it in one session, because my compositions get weird and stagnant when I refine too strenuously. I wanted to have a brick-like hand laying on the ground.
The fissures across the back of the brick-hand evolved into features and Liber’s eyebags – a literal translation of the phrase “knowing the roads like the back of your hand.”
Speedpaint of the Liber de Martinaise portrait.
I wanted to sneakily incorporate the die icons, like Visual Calculus and Conceptualization (you can see them in the bottom left), but a lot of the markings are derived from hobo symbology. (If you would also like to learn a whole lot about Gilded Age hobo communications, the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum website hosts an introductory article here.)
Some real-life hobo-signs and their meanings.
Reader’s Questions
No questions again, you might’ve already run out. If any new one reaches your noggin, [email protected] is still open. Keep in mind the RSS feed is still available to whomever wants it on the site’s footer.
If you’re waiting for the Vertical Slice and start thinking we might be lazy bums, you can now join us via the new Opportunities page of this here website. We’re looking for collaborators in many fields, and I’m sure there must be a way you can contribute.
Next time, we will be discussing Trashologies, how they came to be and what they shall become. See you on the form, or in two weeks.
Driving stick,
Skullhead McShay
Professional Goobster, Amateur Serious Person™.