Disco Elysium – The Final Cut
ZA/UM
Helped bring Disco Elysium: The Final Cut to console and handheld devices, with a focus on accessibility and legibility for this notoriously verbose game. Whether at your desk, on your couch, or out and about, we worked to ensure the experience felt natural and comfortable to read. We also invested considerable effort into making sure controllers felt seamless and intuitive to use.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is a critically acclaimed detective RPG set in a decaying city full of secrets, ideology, and broken people. It blends deep narrative systems with open-ended problem solving, letting players shape their character through thought, conversation, and consequence.
Being a Disaster in More Places
Adjustable text Sizes
We couldn’t support a dynamic text size slider, but we did implement three preset display modes: Monitor, TV, and Handheld. Each mode had its own font sizes, layout rules, and visual adjustments. I created custom style guides for each to account for viewing distance and readability. I also explored a magnifier concept as a possible fallback
I also built a spreadsheet tool to calculate font sizes as degrees of the player’s field of vision, to support decision-making across platforms. I’m currently exploring this more.
Dialogue System improvements
I built interactive prototypes in Adobe XD to show how the dialogue system should handle different use cases. This became especially important as larger text sizes were introduced for TV and handheld play. The prototypes covered combinations of short and long entries, along with varying response list lengths. These detailed examples helped the engineering team plan for edge cases across screen sizes and input types, providing clear reference points for managing layout, scrolling, and timing in the most text-heavy part of the game.
Gamepad Support
The team had an early version of gamepad interaction in place, but it needed refinement. I defined clearer guidelines for how proximity-based selection should behave when using analog sticks. This covered logic for highlighting nearby items, auto-selecting the most relevant object, and supporting manual overrides with the right stick. The result was a more responsive and readable system that preserved the game’s feel while making controller input intuitive and dependable.
“Disco Elysium: The Final Cut stands as one of the best RPGs available on Switch.”
- Ollie Reynolds, Nintendo Life
