Since people ITT are so concerned about my feelings (which is very sweet of you), I'll open up a bit more.
When I first went to Estonia in 2017 and played that early pre-alpha preview build, I was gobsmacked. It was stunningly good, and it was new. It was on a completely different level than the usual cookie-cutter stuff we see, even from most indies. It had a focused, coherent look and feel, in the art, the sound, the text, even though it was rough and even though it was early. I tried to express this in the preview I subsequently wrote as "simultaneously a re-invention and a return to the roots of the genre." From that point on I desperately wanted the game to succeed. It wasn't because of Marat Sar's BDE, Kras Mazov's cool tattoos, Helen's red-headed hawtness, or Kasparov being a very good boy (I'm his mom's alt, remember?), or even the bust of Lenin overseeing the five-year plan. It was because of the game.
The only thing that worried me a little was the studio's capability to actually get shit done: they had one or two experienced programmers, but even they had limited experience actually delivering software. So I offered to come over and talk about the nuts and bolts of actually getting shit done when you're working on software, if they thought it would be helpful. They did, so I went there for a day. We sat in a dusty room with paint flaking off the walls and a whiteboard, there was Jaagup the (then) programming lead, a bunch of producers, one real Estonian-cynical programmer, and a few more people. I didn't have a PowerPoint or anything, we just talked, going back and forth over problems they'd been having, problems I thought they would eventually have, and some ways of dealing with those problems that I had found over the years to be helpful. I heard later that they had adopted some of those ideas and said that they actually did work, which was cool.
Later on they had some other problems and I had a few pretty long video calls with a few of the people there. Those times I didn't really have much in terms of concrete advice to give, it was mostly them talking through the problems and arriving somewhere, but they said later that it helped so maybe it did.
I also had the opportunity to see how the game was coming along. It never strayed the least bit from the vision that came through crystal clear in that early pre-alpha build, it just got bigger and deeper and more polished. Eventually I intentionally stopped following: I don't actually know anything about the game past day 2, because I want to play most of it fresh on release like the rest of you guys.
If it had shown signs of becoming something other than I hoped it would become, I would have lost interest. I have zero financial skin in the game, in fact if you're counting the beans I'm on the losing side here as I've paid for my own damn boat fare and food and what have you, the only compensation I expect I'll probably get is a free game. I'm in this because I really like the game. It's the game I've been waiting for, desperately hoping somebody will make, ever since I first finished Planescape: Torment. Of course I also want you to love it, and I want it to be fantastically successful and turn all of ZA/UM into the decadent champagne socialists they deserve to be, but that's secondary. Ultimately I just want this game to be made so I can play it, and replay it, and replay it all over again.
That is the beginning and the end of my agenda vis a vis Disco Elysium and ZA/UM. There are no ulterior motives, just a burning desire to see this game made, so I can play it. If that nets me a Fanboy tag, I will wear it with pride.
