Before launch, we hosted a series of Discord Live Q&A’s. On the stage during this event, we had the wonderfully talented developers from Surgent Studios, the brains behind Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, answering the community's questions they had been sending in.  

We had a fantastic time both on stage and in the audience, with fantastic questions from the Discord chat, giving an incredible insight from the very team that created ZAU.

On stage, we were fortunate to hear from Abubakar Salim - Creative Director, Zi Peters - Lead Designer, Dominic Hodge - Narrative Designer, and Ackeem Durrant - Lead Designer, and picked their brains on their work. During the hour-long stage, we answered around 40 questions from the audience across all aspects of the game.

We’ve picked out a few highlights for you to catch up on!

Surgent Studios Art Lead, Ackeem Durrant covered questions regarding creative challenges they had to overcome in the game design process.

Q - Which was the most creatively challenging character to design?
A - The Impundulu was the trickiest. At the time, I was the character artist and there were about four iterations, so I’d send it off and Abu would be like “Brilliant, brilliant… Bigger”, we’d send it off and it would be the same thing, “BIGGER!”

Ackeem Durrant

The game development process can often bring up unintentional but funny results. Dominic Hodge, Narrative Designer, shared some hilarious insights into some bugs that came up with the dialogue system within the game, which has thankfully been resolved now!

Q - Any fun stories about bugs or glitches
A - We had a wonderful bug where conversations would loop on themselves, so in the end, you’d end up with about thousands of Zau saying “This way Kalunga.” And it would just get so massive and monumental that it would crack the audio and would have dialogue boxes everywhere

Dominic Hodge

The Discord also asked about our lead character, Zau, and what made him feel unique. Ackeem stepped in to explain how Zau’s tribal hair and tattoo designs helped him stand out from the crowd.

Q - What is your favorite thing about Zau that makes him feel unique?
A - I’m going to have to go with the hair! That’s hair from the Himba tribe. The silhouette that you get from it straight away is distinctive. That was the whole point of it. People have different feelings about it, where it’s based from or what it is, but you can’t put your nose on it. So that as well as the tattoos, the hair, all of that feeds into it.

Ackeem Durrant

Zi Peters, Lead Designer answered the question of whether the game was more focused on combat or platforming, explaining that the game is designed to be a good balance of the two, switching up as you explore the world of Kenzera to keep the gameplay always feeling fresh.

Q - Is the full game more platform puzzle-orientated, or fighting-orientated?
A - I like to think we struck a good balance between the two. We try to combine them so you don’t get too much of a good thing. Basically with give you a bit of combat, and then take the foot off the pedal a little bit, and then let you do a bit more platforming. So it keeps it feeling fresh! And it openly appeals to players who like both!

Zi Peters

Abubakar Salim, Surgent Studios founder and Creative Director was the perfect person to answer the story behind the name of the studio.

Q - Where did the name Surgent Studios come from?
A - Good question! Surgent in my eyes means the idea of “surge”: to rise, the idea of being that voice behind the scenes that is able to tell these stories, bring these stories to the forefront, or to champion and raise these things as a whole.

Abubakar Salim

We hope you enjoyed this little recap of our Discord Q&A and it’s got you even more excited for Tales of Kenzera: ZAU! We’ve got more fun developer interaction events like this lined up very soon so make sure you join the Discord server now and join in on future events.

If you haven’t already, you can learn more and get Tales of Kenzera: ZAU here.

Make sure you keep fully up to speed with all things Tales of Kenzera: ZAU by following the game on all social media platforms.

Follow the game on X - https://twitter.com/ZauTheGame

Follow Surgent Studios on X - https://twitter.com/surgentstudios

Follow the game on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/surgentstudios

See clips from the game on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@surgentstudios

Buy Tales of Kenzera: ZAU here.