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Zero Time Dilemma director details the story creation process

by rawmeatcowboy
25 April 2016
GN Version 5.0

A portion of a Gamasutra interview with director Kotaro Uchikoshi...

GS: We talked when Virtue's Last Reward came out, and I asked you how you could design such an intricate story with so many paths. Now you've gone even further. It's non-linear and even more spread out. How do you design such an intricate story?

Kotaro Uchikoshi: With this title, we set out to solve all the lingering mysteries from VLR. That gave us the basic framework to work within. We needed to figure out how to explain away all the mysteries without contradicting any of the setups from the previous title.

If we only stuck to that, it would be kind of constricting, and it wouldn't be so much fun to create -- or for the player. So we decided to add extra side-stories to give the narrative a little extra punch.

Spoiler alert: As you know from the previous titles, certain characters have the ability to jump through time and space to different histories. Taking that gimmick into consideration also opens up more narrative possibilities.

Our team consisted of myself and two other writers. So we are able to kind of bounce ideas off each other and figure out the best way to make everything work.

Full interview here