How Ray Chase went from Actor to Game Developer with Date Everything | The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook

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Hi, I'm Alexa Rae Correa, and this is the GameMakers Notebook podcast. podcast you may know him as prince noctis or even the tumor from malignant but from now on you will know him as a game developer today's guest is ray chase the iconic voice actor turned video game designer on his team's debut title date everything a dating sim in which you can date everything in your house i remember being told about this game way back in like 2018 2019 And the pitch was, everything in your house is alive and sexy.

What do you do? Well, now we know.

I really don't want to get into details here because this is probably the most out -of -pocket, insane, cool inside baseball conversation I've had about narrative design in a really long time.

He taught himself ink.

Who does that? Ray Chase does that.

This is a really interesting conversation if you're into that kind of inside baseball narrative design stuff, or if you're looking at building tools that can talk with other tools to use in a really fun way.

So please check it out.

Please enjoy. joy. Welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in -depth one -on -one conversations between game makers providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.

The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member -driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment great chase how did you get here how did you get here sitting here today that really that really is such a good question uh well let's say i think we should say this uh alexa you and i are friends this is no no regular podcast interview where you're asking me random questions and I'm giving you random answers.

We go way back. We do.

You and I had read an article that you wrote for GameStop back in the day.

We're doing this? Absolutely we are.

About the bromance in Final Fantasy XV and reached out and we were both absolute nerds and interested in video games and uh and indie games and stuff like that and we hit it off so you in fact well we'll talk about your association with this particular title uh back in the day uh but uh but i'm so happy to be here um i got here by going to my desk and pressing record i'm excited i uh uh you remember how you reach out to me right did you remember that part of the story wasn't it a twitter message or something no you came up to me at like PAX and you said you introduced yourself and you said I'm

working on something really really cool I can't say anything about it but I hope you'll like it and I remember being like yeah cool like great and like we kept in touch and then the Final Fantasy 15 um cast announcement came out and like there you were hi I'm Ray Chase I'm the voice of have knocked us and I just remember being like what the fuck dude like you're the final fantasy protagonist and you didn't tell me so like yeah now here we are such our NDAs uh but I was definitely being a good boy then uh I didn't want to get in trouble my very first title now I say all the secrets all the time

uh go ahead fire me what are you gonna do uh hey let's take a pause for a second alex your waveforms are crazy that i'm seeing on that are we okay with that uh -huh i didn't even notice that we okay how is that is that better is that better that better how about that that looks much better yeah okay yeah oops oh i just You just looked hilarious.

Of course my waveforms are enormous.

Why wouldn't they be?

Oh my god. And then you have like a pop.

There is a thing like when you breathe too it seems to peak as well.

I can't see your setup.

I can't see your setup super well, but it could be that if you just put your mic off axis a little bit it might help.

What does that mean?

So like I can't quite quite see what kind of mic you have but are you talking into the top of it is it a shotgun mic or like a cardioid mic talking to the side you're talking to the side boy I do see a lot of like uh big peaks with with her breath what do we think they just ordered me a pop filter okay okay okay okay No worries.

No worries. Okay. Okay.

Sorry. I have to turn on the technical side, especially if it's recording.

Yeah. Do I sound okay?

You do sound okay. I guess I would just be, I guess it's up to Josh to be worried about the plosives like that.

Excellent. No worries.

Okay. Okay. Starting back.

um cold yeah it's uh final fantasy yeah uh absolutely uh yeah uh came up to you i was meeting a lot of people like i kept the secret that i was working on final fantasy for a very long time uh it was like a good two years um while we were working on it uh that we couldn't announce ourselves um but i was always going to developer focus conferences like gdc um for the the past like 15 years to try to just like meet developers, try to get jobs, do whatever I could to like ingratiate myself to the industry.

And because it's always been such a an interest of mine.

And I never thought that I would make a video game.

That was always, you know, maybe one day that would be cool.

But but this all came about because Robbie and I were goofing off in the studio recording a cartoon one day and then he said what about a game where you can date everything and we all joked and then um then that came down the next day and i said i think i want to make that game i think that game needs to be made it has to be called date everything that has to have a hundred dateable characters and uh that was seven years ago um almost to the day jeez do Do you remember what you were joking about that prompted him to say that?

I think it was, I really wish we knew verbatim what it was.

It's one of those conversations you don't realize changes your life.

But I think it came from, we were talking about what can we do aside from being voice actors.

Being a voice actor is a cool job, but you're always waiting to hear back from auditions.

You're always waiting, hoping that you get cast. there's uh you just try to keep yourself as busy as possible and the best way to keep yourself busy is have some sort of project going on and i've always had some sort of extracurricular going on um for my entire life uh while being a voice actor i also owned and operated a digital media production company called dawn machine with logan burdick who ended up writing on this game a whole lot we go way back um just always like some other thing just put your put put your efforts into something else that might turn out well.

And so I think we were just talking about like, what if we made a video game?

What could that possibly look like?

I don't have a technical background.

I don't have a design background.

I just have a degree in theater.

So what superpowers could we bring as developers if we were to develop something that other developers who have a more technical background might not have?

And I think it came down to, we know a lot of artists from working at cons and meeting a lot of awesome people who are able to make incredible artwork and we know writers from theater and film and we know a lot of voice actors and so with those three things you don't make a platformer you make a visual novel and so then the conversation was well what kind of visual novel could it be dating sims are kind of fun we could make it kind of cheeky and then i think that's where we ended up with just talking about what What kind of dating sim could it be?

And then I think Robbie said the immortal word. So you can just date everything.

I think that's how it went down.

Certainly makes sense.

And this was in like 2017?

This would be 2018, around like May.

June 2018, I think it would be, yeah.

Okay. Because then I remember you showing me something at a GDC, I think, the following year?

The following year.

That next March, yeah.

Yeah. So what we did was we put together a vertical slice.

We had some extra money.

I would say we put around $60 ,000 between me, Max, and Robbie to make something into a vertical slice that we could get a publisher from.

There's no way we would be able to actually afford to make a game like this ourselves, especially with our lack of experience.

So I reached out to Adriel Wallach, who was our lead programmer, and that was on June 17th, 2018, which was exactly seven years ago.

She was the first person on board. And then Greg Batha, who did the UI UX for Dream Daddy, was also on to give game design help.

And Rami Ismail to be just a general counsel, cool dude who can be like, hey, your pitches need to be better kind of energy.

He's really awesome.

Awesome. So we had a small team putting together some stuff.

I believe it was Greg who first said, hey, we can make this in Unity and you should use Ink as your controller.

And that was where my love relationship with Ink started.

Very slowly at first, I thought for sure that I was just going I was going to write a little bit and be in charge of things, but be an executive producer sort of level.

I had no idea how involved I was going to be over the next seven years.

And that was when I first started learning ink.

Ink is a very simple and yet very, very robust program and language that you can use to do interactive stories and branching paths.

You're able to play it within Inkle, the little application.

You can play stuff.

It is not intended for use to...

It's not intended for audio.

Voice acting was something that we had to figure out how to make Ink learn how to to deal with and it limited some ways.

Ink is even more powerful than we could do, but because we were limited that every single line had to be voice acted, we couldn't do cool stuff like Ink does where you have variables within a sentence and you have a different word play.

It's definitely meant for interactive fiction that's unvoiced.

But we started working on the language that we would use to communicate from Ink to Unity and Greg, Adriel, and then we had We had around six writers in Robbie's garage on Miranda Street.

We called it Project Miranda.

Started with the laundry room characters.

And we told their whole story, which was in first person.

It was kind of an escape room puzzle.

The Scandalabra locks you in the laundry room and you have to date your way out of it.

There was no date beaters at this point.

None of that kind of stuff.

Everyone was very rudimentary.

We still ended up voicing the whole thing, which I think was where a lot of our budget went.

We really wanted to put our best foot forward and say, hey, but we can get Laura Bailey in our freaking vertical slice.

Isn't that cool? And then we brought that to GDC in March of 2019, where I met you and I said, hey, you play this thing.

Tell me what you think.

And I played it, and I remember being like, huh?

Huh? And you were I and then I think you it was you and Robbie and you asked me, like, are we crazy for wanting to make a video game?

And I think my response was like, just fucking do it.

Like, just do it. Why not?

Just just fucking do it.

And now here we are.

I do want to backtrack to teaching ink to play nice with voiceover, because typically a lot of these a lot of these game dev tools have ways for you to kind of incorporate an audio pipeline into it but inc again built for interactive fiction so what kind of like like what kind of work where do you start like teaching it teaching ink to talk to a system the big thing uh was greg coming up with the double colons which is uh for each uh speaker you say their name you write their name at the beginning of the line and then two two colons, which we then put into Unity to parse as this is the speaker,

anything to the left of these two colons is the speaker tag.

And then anything to the right is what displays in the text box.

And then you write whatever your heart desires on that line.

And then in the same line, we have a bunch of tags, which Ink allows you by just putting a simple hashtag and then teaching in Unity how to parse these things you're able to put things like we have information on every single line in our game, audio name tags which says uh play this particular file when this line is called and then a pose tag for every single line um and uh and that's just that's just every single line and then we have tons and tons and tons and tons of other tags where we're able to communicate with unity much more robust things, that when this tag is called the dex tag, your

dex is updated. When this tag is called Jerry's junk drawer is empty.

When this tag is called the critical path goes forward. So those, I would say we have probably like 150 different tags that we used in different ways to make our game work in the 3D overworld.

Another huge, huge difficulty with making this game is making a visual novel that exists also in a 3D overworld.

You're essentially making two games at one time.

One is the ink game, the visual novel game, and then one is the 3D overworld game.

And making those two things talk to each other is unbelievably difficult.

That was where we came across the most problems with development.

Yeah, I can, I can imagine because nothing, nothing to me feels like again, we're talking about kind of programming languages that don't play don't play nice with each other unless you build something.

Nothing feels hard coded, like from this end, like you can tell when like audio or something is like hard coded in, and it's not, you know, talking.

But everything is talking to each other, which I can only imagine, like, I would love to take your game and like rip open in the hood and look at what that fricking graph looks like, all that looks like.

But I think everything is hard -coded or you mean you're talking about like systemic, there's, there's some systemic things going on.

Yeah. Because you also have all, all of the different, um, the endings and the, and the different things.

Like when I say hard -coded, I mean like stuff is like locked together.

Everything feels like it's flowing really nicely.

So if it is hard -coded, I can't tell.

It is all hard -coded.

Every single little thing.

So what I also didn't say was like, there's the variables.

We have like 2 ,000 live variables that are being tracked during the game.

Oh my God. A little more.

Now that we've been fixing some more bugs, we realized, okay, we need some more robust variables on some of these characters.

But no, it is all in there.

Ain't nothing systemic going on.

Oh my God. We have like, you know, when a character is, oh boy, when everything happens, everything happens.

You just have to do it.

We have a ton of variable checks that are going on.

I have Keith's, I was working on Keith's Inc.

just before this call.

And I would say for every line that's just dialogue with some audio on it, I would say you can go like 10 lines before a variable changes, before something else is changing or being called.

called. And then I guess another thing, here's another thing that is that we also had to figure out, is the way that it's structured is we have main .inc, which has all the include tags which includes all the other inc files.

There's like 112 or so, because we have a lot of stuff like rumors has its own inc file, data decks, unfurnished business, some debug bug stuff.

It calls it all into one big thing.

And then you go into each of the ink files.

Each of the characters has their own ink file with some exceptions, which causes a lot of problems. Florence and Celia share one which caused a lot of problems. And then we have for a character, we have you go into their ink file.

Here's cam underscore trash can.

This is they're not at the the very top and then you have the um uh the sorter so for each character it's you are talking to cam trash can you are going into unity and unity on this object it says go to cam underscore trash can it goes there and then ink goes through the sorter which of these encounters are you going to go through based on on where you are in other people's quests kim has two quests that he's involved with with other characters and then in his own quest he has like uh one two three four five six seven eight nine ten ten different encounters that you can that you might be sorted

into and then cam is easy he does exist twice in the game but he's location agnostic he'll have the same he's in the office as well as the um kitchen and he has the same dialogue no matter or what but then to make this game more fun we have a lot of characters who are not location agnostic who their quest is all about getting to know the different ones around the house abel has eight different tables around the house dorian has 17 doors curtain rod has nine different locations where um the sorter has to be duplicated nine different times which um yeah here's curtain rod uh my god you are going

to talk to yeah here you go shade underscore jim is within curt rod .inc and then it has another sorter underneath that to say you are talking to the gym curtains and then where are you in their um path going going uh forward so that the correct thing uh happens during the door with his 17 doors and his interactions with uh stuff is uh 4800 lines with uh i would say most of it being code because of all of his ridiculous sorters uh yeah we talk so i've talked a lot on this show about the theater kid to game developer pipeline that's a it's a it's a thing yeah i have i can see that yeah no one no one

has ever i think had as aggressive a journey as i think you have i guess so maybe because this is like go ahead.

Yeah, I thought going through, it would just be like, yeah, I would come up with ideas and stuff.

But it came to a point and fairly quickly in development where I said, someone has to step up and just do this and design all of the variables and just do it.

We had at a certain point, we had some consultants helping and they put up a big spreadsheet with here's all the variables and we're going to have a systemized name of doing it so everyone can communicate and nobody used it.

Nobody's gonna communicate and say, I made all of these variables and I'm gonna update the spreadsheet so that I'm communicating properly with everyone.

Everyone just did what they wanted and then someone had to go through and just make it work.

And instead of, there's a certain point when communication gets more difficult than just doing the work.

And that was pretty fast where I was just like, I'm just gonna design the whole variable system.

I'm just going to take on the responsibility of doing it.

I happen to be good at this.

I'm able to do it for whatever reason, I have no idea, and I don't mind it so much, especially with things like systemic things.

Someone had to be in charge of doing systemic stuff.

So for each of our characters, we have three different endings for him, at least, plus realization, realization returns, quests, things like that.

And someone had to systematize, like how do the realization path things all work?

How do all these variables work so that everyone can communicate with each other.

And so I just ended up designing all that.

It was a lot of work.

Some of the harder ones were things like unfurnished business, which I realized early on once we came up with the idea of realization that you may bring these characters to life and they leave the house.

That canonically, they're leaving the house, so they shouldn't come back.

and what that meant was you have to find a system that blocks off the player from just realizing somebody and then not being able to go through another characters because they appear in each other's stories all the time um and so I had to uh go through all the guest appearances where everybody appears and um and keep track of all of those have Skylar do all the checks have Skylar do all the checks again when you are returning uh when she's already said them so that she says You've already done this.

I'm reminding you of this," which is slightly different verbiage and put them all in.

That was probably the hardest part of developing, which was taking care of all of those.

You have characters like, here's Bathsheba in front of me.

She only has three datables who are part of her Unfurnished business.

So you only have to account for eight different let's see yeah bathsheba bassiva river rebel river runifred rebel winifred just rebel just river just winifred so just seven uh different uh versions of it but then you have some characters like dorian where uh he's involved in so many different stories that his unfurnished business is enormous and it's like 20 different uh sorry you still have to talk to lyric hirohime Arma, Washford, all that sort of stuff.

If we're going in deep, this is the kind of stuff that, yeah, I don't normally talk about.

But I did listen to this podcast before where I'm like, hey, man, this is the one where you just go down and dirty and say, like, here's what we did, man.

That's crazy. It's crazy.

It was really miserable for a lot of that.

But also I didn't have to talk to anybody, which also made it a little bit easier.

I didn't have to coordinate as much with like, hey, what did you do for Stefan's story programming?

I could just look at the work that I had already done.

I didn't have to worry about version control because I made all of the versions of it.

So, it was like, all right, I only have to worry about what I did.

If there's a bug or if someone had a new idea with the character, and that just made it easier than communicating, man.

Sometimes communication is so, so, so much harder than just doing it yourself.

yeah, but you literally taught yourself a programming language and then built a system like that's a system.

Yeah, it really is.

Yeah. This was a weird game that nobody had ever made this type of game before.

Because I also designed the narrative, which was, we knew that it had to be 100 characters.

We knew that that's what it had to be.

But how do you make that not repetitive?

competitive how do you how do you make progress how do you make it so that it's a fun game that you continue to want to play and that was uh i think that's also why it worked where i was doing all the ink programming because i was like all right i have the best grasp on how the interrelated critical path and then the character paths all work together and then design a game around it with specs points, with realization and the critical path.

And again, I didn't have to talk to people.

I just did it. Or I would talk to people and give very meticulous assignments.

We had the first round of development once we got funded by Team17, we had a ton of writers on.

It was very throw the spaghetti against the wall, see what sticks, put it in there, make it work.

and then we had uh and we had a lot of characters who had a lot of overlap which uh to me it was something i really really wanted to avoid no overlap in this game because that would just feel like you were cheated out of another experience um and uh we had some characters that weren't fun to play that it just seemed like is this the best version of the character that it could be is this what people would would think of or can we subvert expectations and if it wasn't either either of those, and it just seemed like, I don't know, I don't think this one is working.

So then we had another round, where we essentially took a lot of I would say, like, we kept like, 30 % of that first round, we kept all of those characters as they were, got all of the got a lot of interesting voices in.

And then we paired it down to a much smaller, Tighter writing staff, uh, where we got Suha Al -Samkari, who I always give props for, who just took over 23 characters and was like, uh, I know what to do.

She, she was from visual novels.

She knew how to do it.

She's a game developer herself and, uh, super reliable, super funny, super good at writing sexy characters that aren't explicit, like really good at understanding that.

Um, and then it was a much more streamlined process of, of, Hey, Suha, who do I got?

Here's Timothy time piece.

Here's the skeleton of it.

I would write the whole ink file with all the variables and then put general ideas under each stitch, which is how inks are categorized for each of these encounters as a stitch and just write notes in them.

Here's what we do. Here's what you have to do.

Please make sure you address these issues.

and then she'd just do it she'd be the the muscles and organs of the the skeleton that i put in and then we we put it all together and uh that was the second like the second half of development was really paring down what this game is and making it feel really nice and cohesive and then what sua also did this was very late in development and why he's not a dateable character was she wrote the entire narrator because we did not have a narrator for most of the development of the game Yeah.

I'm still dumbfounded about the, I'm sorry, I'm just absolutely dumbfounded by this.

It's silly. It's weird that it all came together.

It's weird that it's seven years later that we did it.

We had people on this.

It just is like everyone was in the right place at the right time that we were able to get people like Garrett Williamson, who seems to have a specialty of just absolute diversity in terms of music which is what this needed it was hey we have this character can you come up with a song that doesn't sound like any of the other songs here's a genre we haven't used yet and he'd be like absolutely two days later come up with a theme and like who else who else can do that man like that's just insane or nijuku who is our lead artist uh who designed all of the characters and did all the expressions and just

say like, hey, we have this character.

And then she came up with a cohesive house style for all of these with such a sense of humor, such a sense of detail.

And all of these things just came together.

Everybody who was a part of this just came together to make something that worked.

And I just can't imagine it happening with anybody else.

It was the perfect team.

team. I, this story kind of reminds me of the Expedition 33 team who found each other on Reddit.

Like, how did you, yeah, they, Guillaume, the creative director, found Jennifer Swedberg, again, the lead writer on Reddit.

And she was a finance girl.

And now she's a game writer.

But they, they all kind of found each other on Reddit, because they just were bored at Ubisoft and wanted wanted to make this new project.

So how did you, how did you find all of these people who serendipitously were the dream team for this?

Um, I would say, uh, so, uh, one of the most important people, the writer, uh, ended up being the eventual writer for Beverly, the beverage, um, is, uh, a, uh, a wonderful person named Devin Connelly who worked when we did the, when we did the initial pitches for a vertical slice in 2019, when you played it, basically what happened was everybody said no, or we got really heinous offers that were like, this seems like a scam.

I don't know. This is very strange.

And so we were basically turned down by everybody.

And Devin was the receptionist at Skybound or Skydance.

I can never remember remember one of the skies.

And she said, she, she walked us into the, the president's office.

We, we met with him, pitched it.

He was interested, but eventually said no. That is just in align with, with their brand at Skybound or Skydance.

And then he and then she walked us out, but she always remembered the game.

She was like, she followed up with us during COVID and being like hey did you guys ever get published like i still think about you guys and i was like nah it never happened uh kind of gave up on that and she said well i know someone named amanda hufford who is really good at linking up uh indie developers with publishers can we give you their contact and so entered amanda hufford into our lives who is a voice actor you might know them as Raghatha from Amazing Digital Circus, and also as Rebel in our own game.

But has such good business acumen and producorial traits that they were really able to help us through the entirety of development once Team 17 came on.

And Team 17 came on solely because of them.

I found out going through my emails, I had reached out to Team 17 long ago in 2019, received no response.

And yet when Amanda reached out, we were able to get a meeting and then eventual over the course of maybe about six months of negotiations, funding for the game and began in the summer of 2022, three years ago.

At that point, we thought we had already done a lot of work on it, but we had no idea how much, just how much was left to do.

And then how enormous this game was going to be in terms of the increase of scope assets quality of life and um we also when we when we got funded by team 17 this game was isometric we thought that that would be an easier way of making it could save us money on assets and uh it led to some problems pretty quickly within those the first six months where we were developing You could see your character, which led to a more character creation system.

You could do their body type.

You could do skin color.

You could do all the nine yards.

But it ended up just being so scoped out and unfeasible because we wanted the character to animate and move and have different emotes and be integrated into the environment.

environment and the reason why i think the lynx awakening style is a little bit easier is because he doesn't really do anything he just puts his sword and runs around uh he has like three or four verbs whereas in this one we would we would need a million verbs for putting toast in the toaster was an animation getting burned by the toaster was an animation using the vacuum cleaner was an animation um running while using the vacuum cleaner was an animation so it just ended up becoming uh way too much so we had a that was another big part of development where we were we had to really retool everything

and say okay let's go back to the first person and i'm so glad that we did that was absolutely the right choice but also like 100 characters you kind of did that to yourself why why why 100 why 100 just because it's a nice number the best number i love this number 100 um it's just so stupid it's just the stupidest number if it was when we were pitching pitching it we were like could we pitch a version of this with 50 characters and it just didn't feel right but even more than that um when you actually look at what's in a house there's way more than a hundred discreet physical objects and we also knew

that we wanted to um do um concepts as well and date the game and date the text box and stuff like that so it just seemed like a hundred seemed to show what a house could be of and still feel right i think we did a really good job of balancing like the things that have to be in there you can't have a this game without a chair you gotta have jeremy in there you have to have table you have to have window walls floor ceiling um and those those like necessary characters take up like 50 immediately and then we also wanted to have fun characters unexpected ones like our tina the triangle like uh our

rubber duck, like, um, uh, the, the sex toys, things that were just like, Hey, we gotta have this just to make it feel fun and vibrant and unique.

And then put in our character, our, um, in Koi characters, um, like Reggie rejection, like text box, Sean, like date the devs and, um, and have it feel good.

A hundred is a huge number.

And there are so many times where I've had to, we come up with a feature and then we we just have to do it 100 times and that was just uh learning how to do something 100 times over and over again there's a really weird thing that happens when you've done something around 30 times you're like oh that's a lot and then you go man i'm not even halfway through it's uh it's really long um very very hard but i think that's why i think it's um connected with a lot of people because it's uh it's so stupid it's a very stupid you keep saying stupid let's come up with like a a more, more positive descriptor for this.

It is, uh, excessive.

It's excessive. It's a little much. It is luscious.

Um, all of those sorts of things.

Um, sorry, go ahead.

I think, I think I like stupid because it's, there is something remarkable.

That's about someone who does something stupid and does it anyway.

Uh, something that is, is obviously a bad idea for making a game.

Definitely, when we told a lot of developers that we were doing this, they would go like, what a bad idea.

You're never going to make this game.

It's impossible to test, impossible to make.

You're making an asset heavy game.

You have to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of lines and assets for every one of these characters when instead you can make a much more robust and sleek game that just had a core gameplay loop that would would have you know that roguelike thing that's a lot cheaper to make uh but no we had to design every single thing which is uh very stupid little little self -deprecating humor as well how yes when you were picking when you were picking additional objects so obviously you have to have chair table wall ceiling stuff like that but when you were picking all of the extra stuff like the game

console the dice like how did you decide what objects you wanted to you wanted to make and date like how did you pick we had uh yeah we had an original spreadsheet the og spreadsheet and i feel like we just named a lot of things that we were like that would be fun we had the necessary ones which were like 50 of them and then we uh you know we did it like another another hundred i think we had like around 150.

and then we just kind of had to pare them down about like how feasible is this does anything spark joy is there anything where we were like oh we can come up with a cool character that i would really enjoy writing or would enjoy talking to that that didn't have any overlap with anybody else and it just felt and it felt right and that That process continued throughout development up until I would say about a year ago when we finally locked down our 100 characters.

But it was always about thematic overlap and making sure that nobody was doing the same thing.

We have in your house, there are a remarkable number of objects that make things hot.

There are a remarkable number of objects that disinfect things and clean things.

There's just a ton of them.

And how do you make it so that they all still feel different?

How is an air fryer different from a microwave, different from a stove, different from a toaster, different from a water heater, different from your HVAC?

How is the sink different from detergent, different from a vacuum cleaner, different from everything, air and water?

So that happened up until the end.

We were still paring down on a lot of characters.

And it always, it came to, yeah, a lot of them, the Sink one was a big one.

I don't know if you met Sinclair the Sink, but it was just a moment of a eureka moment where I was like, we can play with, it can be Sink themes, but not talk about washing all the time.

And what if we tell a totally different story where instead of when you point your deviators at something and they just say, hey, I'm this guy and I'm cool with being who I am.

They say, help me. I'm a sink.

I'm not a sink, though.

I'm a human being. My name is Martin Applegate.

You have to help me.

I've been cursed by a fortune teller.

And then have that just be a completely different character that's unlike anybody else.

That's fine. And so I think that was a lot of where a lot of our last added characters ended up being.

And then we had two more when our publisher said, hey, we have DLC and you have to come up with it in three months.

And we just rushed and scrambled.

And I wrote Mikey and Lucinda, who I think I was glad that they both also exist in completely separate spaces thematically and gameplay wise than all the other characters.

Well, Lucinda is played by Ash Ketchum's voice actress, right?

This is absolutely true.

Yeah, I did encounter her.

and I was like oh so this is Big Titties Ash Ketchum wonderful exactly um I'll I I will take it what a what a surprise but in addition to everything you just mentioned you also have like we've talked about Dorian there are seven he's there are 17 versions of him and but but yet you are still interacting with him every time you encounter him and you were talking about the the curtain and the rods where if they're in the gym if they're um there's just the the rules that some of them are different but they're not but they're the same like how do you go about how why did you do that number why did

you do that um i think some of these location dependent ones really they had to be told that way because they were in the house so many times with window curtains tables doors they're just all over the frickin place and so we had to come up with like it's that it just doesn't feel right if you half -assed it and you're like all the doors are the same you just talk to one door and it's it's the same Dorian also was always thought of as this character who was always for friendship that was from the very beginning and always giving hints about hey I am the way into the office let me me tell you about the inhabitants

of this office and give you a whole bunch of rumors and hints.

And so it just had to be that way.

I just feel like it would have been half -assed if such real estate was only one encounter.

With Wendelin, when TJ was writing her, he said, it was immediately like, well, what's she looking out of?

And I was like, well, there's four different cardinal directions.

She should be telling a different story depending depending on which one you talk to.

And same with Kurt and Rod.

They're always throwing shade.

And it just seemed right where it was like, well, they're all in these different rooms, they should talk about the inhabitants of all these different rooms. These are characters that are much harder to design, but I think ultimately very, very worthwhile to make them feel good.

The only one who didn't is Cherimi.

And the reason why is because she has her own ridiculous mechanic, which is, you have to talk to her at certain times of day and certain days of the week so that she puts puts on one of her plays so if that was also location dependent uh i would quit the game and we and we couldn't make it why did why did you do this to yourself so some some of these some of these characters like you just mentioned also have unique criteria in order to interact with them to get what you want out of them i mean we've already talked about how you've had to basically rule sets upon rule sets tags upon tags upon tags

yeah but at what point in development were you looking at these characters and were like oh the chair needs its own mechanic like is was that was that again just like uh hey let's just do this or was there like i don't know like where does that come from we when our original pitch is when we had the first um round of of writers um we had a lot of pitches and they those characters just stayed that way so we had um jello apocalypse um brendan and Blaber who came in, a brilliant writer and really likes playing on hard mode just as much as I do, and took a lot of the thorniest, most difficult characters

and said, screw it, let's make Jeremy do five different plays at different times of, at different days of the week.

Because we have this mechanic in here.

We have a day of the week mechanic.

Why not use it? And I think I feel the same way about game design.

It's like, well, if you have a mechanic, you are doing time time of day, you are doing days of the week.

Why not have characters who interact with that mechanic?

So that's, that's chairing me right off the bat.

And then a lot of it was, well, how do you make these characters feel different and continue to surprise?

And it's characters like Timothy, I'm really proud of where he is the cat clock.

He tells you to come at a certain time because he's very prim and proper and also very annoying and off -putting.

And I think people, um some people follow his instructions and you never know that if you didn't follow his instructions you get an entirely different playthrough where he's timmy who's uh uh a very silly cat uh who's uh says who says saw we ooh kind of cat and uh is is completely different um but that that to me is a surprising interaction with the mechanic that um i don't know keeps i I guess it just keeps you playing.

Just really didn't want it to be boring.

Whenever a character was like, this is just, it's just a little bit basic.

We always had to come up with something to make it a little bit more interesting gameplay -wise, voice -wise, design -wise, whatever we could do.

So is there a way to successfully date all 100 characters?

Like, can you beat the game?

Or is it just like, we're free for all until further notice uh so yes the the critical path goes forward um depending on your actions there's two main paths um which is the good path and then the hate path i would say are like the two like main ways of playing um there the hate path also this is really hard to design the critical path because you had to design for a hundred hate playthrough and still make it work And you also had to design for a 60 hate playthrough, which is just a little bit awkward because this is a player who is hating but not that much or is just remarkably bad at the visual

novel aspect. Me. But not enough to like fully commit to it.

And you still had to make sure that it would work for that.

So the critical path goes forward as you awaken characters, which means talk to them for the first time.

so it encourages players to keep going around the house and tracking your progress that way and then once you've awakened 50 of them you hear about realization which is the second half of the game where you can bring these characters to life and then the critical path keeps going forward the more that you realize the only way that you can realize a character is if you have a friend or a love ending associated with it so all of the features are interacting your awakening characters You are getting endings with them.

You're hopefully getting a good ending.

And we're not making friendship or love be one better than the other.

They're both great.

And then hate is where if you are hating a lot of these characters, then you're not realizing them.

So then there's another way in which the critical path goes forward, which is the hate gate system, where the critical path characters sort of have bad endings that affect the critical path in sort of like a domino effect.

But the dominoes only fall once you pass through another gate.

So that way it would still work even if you weren't going for 100 % playthroughs.

You'd get like 60 realized, 40 hates, and you would get like a couple of the critical path characters who essentially hate you and it affects the plot.

But then you have the other characters who haven't been affected by the gates because you didn't trip over them by hitting more characters and you'd have an ending.

And the ending happens when you leave the house.

You have different ways of, different times that you can leave the house and get a different ending.

And the true ending, the best ending is realizing 93 characters, which basically is with, because there's also a hate undo system where you can undo a hate ending, but only a limited number of times.

you could get uh 13 hate endings and still get the best uh ending of all of them jesus christ okay that's a lot that's that's a lot forget like endings and again we talked about this tags upon tags upon tags funneling forever and ever and ever i imagine that qv -ing the system is quite a heavy lift uh qv like oh sorry yeah qa yeah like okay um yes it was very very difficult and i think led to a lot of the um the the two delays that we had um and in communicating that with our publisher which was i think the our publisher was always aware of the game that we were making.

But I think they didn't quite know how deep it went because of all the different ways of doing it.

So on paper, it's like, well, we just have to get a love ending with all of these characters and then love endings is tested and get a friend ending and friend is tested.

But we have so many other things going on.

We have a lot of matches in our game.

You can, you know, ship two characters together and become a throuple.

We have a lot of weird stuff going on that makes it really impossible to QA.

And so we reached points where Team17 very graciously did not cancel our game and instead said, all right, we'll just keep making this work.

And this was the point where I had to fund the game myself, put my savings into it because we failed.

I said on the other podcast, too, but we failed every single milestone.

And so we would eventually get paid, but it ended up costing about a half a million dollars more than we thought it would.

And I thankfully had a really good year of conventions.

And so it just went into that.

You said, I think, earlier, how do you not give up?

And I think it's because you just put everything on the line.

And like, if we gave up at the 95th percentile, then, then I would have lost everything and just seven years of my lifetime, the drain.

So it's just like, well, there's no other way to do it.

We have to figure this out.

And so, um, we just, we all stepped up, man.

And our, our team is, uh, is amazing for, for not having given up, uh, even as, uh, as annoying as this game was to work on i think for for some people oh my god niche toward the ends yeah ninja are character designer toward the ends there was so many times when i was going through like oh my god one of the last things we did i really fought for this i was like we have to have the expressions change on every line otherwise it's really boring to look at and it doesn't feel like you're getting to the date that the um the character at all it feels like you're not reacting um and so we did a whole

pass pass on all 80 ,000 lines uh the expressionistas pass uh where we went through there was like four of us uh who um who went through and assigned a a tag for every single line and a pose and then going through that pass it was me i still commissioned more artwork from nitro i was like man i need a pose of skyler where her arm is going down um can you please do it and i think at towards the end she's like ray stop why do you need this i'm like i have to it didn't work uh for what she ended up becoming when you designed the character um uh towards the end but i think uh i think even then uh she

uh she doesn't hate me because uh i can see her uh her pull request going through where she's watching playthroughs and and making changes too on her own because uh we i think we all just have perfectionist really high standards of just like ah but it's got to be good it has to yeah oh my god i i jesus christ um you know what alexa i think what's happening also is i'm actually just talking and not thinking about like being entertaining i'm just actually talking to you and i think maybe that's why it's uh kind of like a a a train running at you is kind of how I feel like my energy is because I'm

not you're actually a friend and I don't have to I don't have to put on any sort of polish under this conversation.

No, I feel like I feel like I'm learning.

I feel like we're trauma bonding.

Like I feel like I just feel like I feel I feel so deeply because I have worked.

So like it has been it is no secret projects i've worked on in the past all like dealt with uh systemic systemic procedural pieces of trying to build a narrative system that is robust that allows for a high level of um a high level of reactivity to giving to the player giving the player like so many love so many different levers to pull and then also levers that they don't realize they're pulling so we can surprise and delight and make you know make these um make these relationships really make what happens in the game really feel reactive and it's just so freaking wild to me that what you've

built is essentially like a large like just funnel of of tags and then you also had to make that talk to a system that it doesn't normally talk to which is just a colossal amount of programming work and engineering work which like my brain is already like swimming with like oh my god like because again i'm also working on something else so it's like wait a minute i never thought of that which is why we have this podcast um that's crazy so then but so then kind of going going back to your writing going back to the tags going back to the lever pulling several of your quite a few of these characters

that we are talking about that have to be realized and and nuanced and different, they're also service characters.

When I say service characters, I mean like Skylar, who is your glasses, who's guiding you through.

Maggie, your text box Chan, like the characters that provide like a Scandalabra, like the characters that basically serve a game mechanic function.

Like this is how you get more.

I didn't know that term.

Your phone. Definitely.

I thought service characters are different.

Yeah. You can call them whatever you want.

but I think of them as service characters.

And then, you know, your phone.

Like these are characters that have a very specific mechanical lift that are tied into the functionality of the game itself.

And you also wrote these characters to also be dateable.

So when you have characters that are like, these are functional and the player needs to interact with them and by virtue will probably have a bit more time with these characters versus the, you know, the ship in a bottle or the dice that you kind of have to go and seek out how do you weight them how do you write them in a way that's like is it in the writing of the character itself or do these service characters maybe have a little more time for you to date them so every interaction doesn't turn into something that weighs into a dating encounter like how do you balance that?

That is a great question that I've never been asked before but was certainly something that was on my mind.

You have to have all these characters interact with all the systems. You have to be able to realize Skylar's specs, get all these endings and still be able to play the game, you're right.

So... Yeah, Skylar.

So I would say our service characters are Reggie Rejection.

Yeah. The embodiment rejection appears when you get a hate ending and is the shepherd through the, he shepherds you through the hate path.

He rewards you as you get more hates, talks to you, says like, this is great.

Dorian is the shepherd of the friend path.

And then Skylar is the shepherd of the love path, as well as she's your in -game systems menu.

Yes. Or when you, this wouldn't work on an options menu where it's like, what is she talking about?

Oh, yeah. She like tutorializes collectibles.

She tutorializes strategy.

strategy who should i be dating how should i be dating is a love ending better than a friend ending can i put my fantastic red shirt back on um she also does i think a lot of people just haven't gotten this far but she has a lot of end game stuff where she's like hey i'm just gonna tell you where these stupid dateables are uh because uh you've been playing for long enough uh don't worry about it i'll just tell you um so she has a lot of end game stuff uh oh yeah she also makes it so that you can fall asleep at any time in the end game once you've realized all the characters uh you're running out

of people to talk to and uh you need uh you need a little bit of help there so she also does like secret things like that that wouldn't really fit in an options menu it's nice to make those things in universe and then maggie maggie gives you the rumors uh and then goes on some mysteries and ties a lot of characters together and i think that's it is Is it just those four I'm going through?

Your phone. Phoenicia gives you the phone and gives you the apps and stuff.

But like, thankfully, her story is mostly just about doing rumors.

And it's about her overheating and getting off her screen so much. But thankfully, not a system character.

And then Keith the key, I guess also systems because he opens up the attic for you.

uh and he also uh there was and oh no he's actually also another systems character because of the uh candy mechanic he's the one who gives you the delicious candies that can undo a hate ending um maybe i'll think of some more but but those are the ones and i'll say what i had to do like one of the ideas that we had originally was um that that reggie rejection and skylar and dorian only work you could only get their endings if you got 99 other ones so like the only way to get reggie to love you was if you have 99 hates and it just seemed really thorny and really annoying and like i don't know if this if this makes

any sense um very hard to test uh and uh same with skylar if a hundred loves she would love you and that sort of stuff um and then i yeah so i would say about midway through development i had to scrap that and then just go well there must be some other way where their systems can still function and they'll treat you in different ways um but uh they uh uh they maybe yeah they They maybe treat you differently.

I think Skylar – let me look at the ink.

Skylar, I wrote her – because you still need to get through the menu.

She has little lines that play only if you have a hate ending with her where she's like – yeah.

I'll just say one that's not a spoiler.

A lot of these are spoilers.

I can't believe it.

uh but like uh she'll just say like as you're leaving her she says isn't that right you son of a bitch only if she has a hate ending but it still works still functions um she still lets you do it um and then with reggie the way that and so and so the way i designed skyler's um friend love and hate endings uh were about her because she ended up being the lore person yeah and she has i don't know if you met the suspension of disbelief but it is the little spring inside of her glasses that make the glasses work and her lore her story is about making sure that you can believe in the suspension of disbelief

and make things work out but even if you don't the game still works and then reggie's i was really happy with his you have his app and you play target practice with him where you he teaches you how to be hateful and he puts you on these fake dates which say things like uh hello there i'm a nice friendly dateable and you can say fuck you or hello and if you say hello if you say fuck you he's like yeah that's the right one that's how to get people to hate you uh and then you can win the target practice um and he's very happy with you but the real way to get to him is by completely screwing it up over

and over again which makes him angrier and angrier.

And then he says, I hate you.

And then he goes, I hate you.

You're so good at this.

And then he falls in love with you.

So you can find a clever way around a lot of these things without having it mess up the entire playthrough for somebody.

There's a lot of like, I will say going through trying and failing to date the things in this house a lot of subversion of oh i'm so bad at this ray i'm so bad um i was saying earlier it's definitely like the autism i can't tell when someone's flirting with me so i just go i just i pick the wrong thing every time um neil newbon already hates me in the game i'm very sad uh but the the the idea with like any game that has a relationship system in any form it's kind of like So it's you, you're doing, I think of I'll use Mass Effect as an example because it's an it's an easy one.

But you have these, you know, set of criteria, this this this checkbox that you're like, oh, I have to do this.

I have to I have to be I have to be nice.

I have to be kind. I have to show interest. I have to give them gifts.

I have to take them on missions.

and then we get to have sex. And that's the, that's like, that's the, the consummation is like the reward. And then it's like, well, what happens after?

And you're like, I did it.

Now what? And it's interesting that in this game you have, you know, you have love and friendship kind of both on the same level of like, neither one of these is better than the other, but they're both a possibility, which I think is like, is, is really, is really refreshing.

But it's, it's interesting because some of the choices that I that I make thinking okay this is a flirty response or this is like he's cool and nonchalant maybe if I'm cool and nonchalant he'll be interested in me and I pick the wrong thing and they're like oh whatever like you're you're boring um which is cool so there's a lot of that thank you I think that uh I think that was also just another opportunity that we had with this game because it was a hundred and no lead characters You can really mess around with the kindness coin system where you're not just, you know, giving them gifts, being

nice to you, just picking the right pick, the right answer.

And they'll and they'll fall in love with you.

You could tell a lot of different types of stories and do it a lot of different mechanically different ways where we have a lot of characters who are points where.

And it's dependent on personality, like Tina the Triangle is a points character, but she doesn't like it when you're nice to you.

But she is keeping track of each of your responses.

And then you get an ending at the end where, did you get enough points?

You got her love ending, you got her friend ending, you got your hate ending.

We have, like I would say, a quarter to a third of our characters are just strictly points -based.

That's like the dating sim thing, which I think is a good, you still want those characters.

I don't think it's a cop out to have those characters at all.

I think it's everyone was crazy.

It would just be so disorienting.

We have those those characters.

But then it also allowed us to like flex our muscles about like, well, what other ways can we tell a love story and tell them in completely wildly different ways?

I'm proud of Parker, who's the board games who only gives you an ending randomly.

But you have the you have the chance to make your role better depending on how you played, but it'll still be random.

And he was really, really fun to design and like, and play it.

If we were Mass Effect, and you had a character, after 60 hours of playing, who gave you an an ending randomly you'd throw your xbox against the wall because that's awful you'd feel like how dare you but if it's a hundred characters and you're like ah it didn't work out you could move on to the next one and still feel like you had a really good time um and uh and it was okay to um it was okay to skip characters entirely write them off yeah get their points and then move on to the next one because there's always something weirder around the corner that's also where we We were able to get away with our

content -aware system, which is the system where if you find a character who has some sort of potentially triggering content, you can just skip them entirely.

And we, again, had this weird opportunity.

There was stupid stuff about our game that made it impossible to make.

But there was also stuff like this where it was like, well, yeah, we can just skip Harper and Dirk completely.

And there's no problem.

There you go. You missed out on 45 minutes of a story.

but um but if it's if it's not for you then it's not for you and um you can just never have them in your game at all and that was um I think that was a cool opportunity that we were able to get around with the fact that you could just skip characters entirely because we have no lead characters I mean I I will never turn down an opportunity to be yelled at by Laura Bailey really.

So I, I, I went, went into that, but I did want to ask about that.

I love it. I'm so into it.

I do want to, I did want to ask about the content aware feature because typically, typically in, in games, you know, we see disclaimers like this about sensitive content.

We either see nothing and then all of a sudden we're, you know, I don't know, 20 hours into the the game and we have to shoot dogs last of us part two how dare you and like yes that's something that's something i wish i knew going into that game because guess what i put that game down and didn't finish it for months because i was upset about that um and then you see and then you have games that put the content warning right at the top and are like this game deals with and then it doesn't really tell you where or how it doesn't give you when in context and so you're like like i'm kind of like am

i gonna get blindsided by something um expedition 33 i love that game but as a child of immature parents god damn i needed a trigger warning at the top of that game um well that's like a story for another day but i um i uh i appreciate how thoughtful and also it's not just it's not just a text box that's like oop like trigger warning you might might want to skip like Skyler actually comes out and talks to you and it's like oh this deals with this like are you okay with that like it made it it made it way like because I know a lot of some people have you know whatever you feel about trigger warnings

and media and whatever it was very thoughtful and also made the game because you're trying to make a game about intimacy made it more intimate where like the game's not just like do you want this or not you're actually having a conversation with the game about whether or not you want to continue with this which I I think is really interesting.

When, when did you, when did you decide to implement that?

And how did you go about doing that?

That locks out content that was during voice recording.

I feel like the first couple of weeks we had people in and, um, you know, we're, you're talking about all these characters internally, you're used to what they are, but then you're putting in front of somebody for the first time and sharing a character of the first time ever.

And we found that like, Oh man, some of these are a little bit harder to talk about or like, Oh man, I wish we We could have told the actor before because it made them uncomfortable.

And so that's where we kind of came up with the idea that like, well, maybe we can lock these off.

And thankfully, we were able to get them in.

It was quite difficult to make these because of the amount of weird assets that you need.

You need a line for Skyler.

You need a line for JB, the narrator, for all of these things.

You need it to work with unfurnished business because you're skipping a character so that all of their variables still have to be checked.

Um, so the character can be realized that it doesn't create any blockers.

You have to make data decks entries for all of these saying you skipped out due to content concerns.

They're your friend.

So for every single one of those, even though it doesn't take up very much time in game, it was a really hard thing.

It's not something you can generate systemically, um, where you can just run a parser and say like generate all these, uh endings i had to type every single one of those in manually and it was really tough and caused a lot of bugs um and was was tough to do but thankfully we were able to get it in before uh felicia and jb finished recording and they were able to get a lot of those in you can see like i think we got it right uh when ben we got it before ben waugh came in and we got a little bit more robust where ben waugh talks talks back to skyler and it's a fun little thing but we couldn't get

that for everybody uh unfortunately it was just we were running out of time at that point so fairly late into development i would say um and somehow we were able to pull it off i know that we've had since the demo's been out we've had some other calls for maybe three or four other characters that need content warnings and i i i think we can pull it off but it is harder than it looks um uh very very tough to to put in i bet it's a very it's choosing when when we're in like how to deploy sensitivity warnings i don't think like we're i think us as a as a medium as like maybe the entire entertainment

industry i think we're still trying to figure like we haven't gotten it right yet we're still trying to figure out how how how you know people experiences varied feelings are varied but i definitely think that the content aware system in this game is something that other developers should be looking at yes yeah and if but only if you can like i mean it is hard like how do you put that into a big ass rpg to lock out a whole character um it does seem difficult i wouldn't blame them for for other people going i don't know this this seems crazy it's it's definitely a delicate it balance but for i

think a dating sim that is like so like by nature it's like this is going to be heavy like either way like dating sims kind of always are no matter what they are so i think it definitely fits with the genre but for a big ass jrpg i i don't know that's for that's for some maybe that's for you to find out final fantasy 17 will have ray chase's content 10 aware system.

Hire him. So wait, how many lines is this game?

Did I ask that question already?

I don't think you did.

So this game is 1 .6 million words, which is almost as much as Baldur's Gate 3, which is 1 .8.

It is very long. It is 80 ,000 voice lines, and I think 70 ,000 unique voice lines, because there's some duplicates here and there.

That's it. I think I think that's what, oh, 13 ,000, uh, images, five hours of a soundtrack.

Um, it's, uh, and somehow only eight gigabytes.

Dude. Yeah. What? I'm, that's, I'm, my brain is doing the math.

So then you had, you've had quite a, how big was your writing?

How big was your writer's room?

Uh, yeah, so it, it, it did change over time.

Sure. which was, I think we started out with 20 for that first one and then ended up with 30 to 40 characters written.

And then it was, and at that, at that point, I don't think I was writing at all.

Um, I had some characters, but I was always spending all of my time doing the design, um, uh, process and, um, and editing as lead writer, um, everybody's stuff and making sure that it got in and, and giving feedback and stuff like that.

I wrote, I wrote 14 characters and I I did most of them at the very very end with Skylar being the very last one that I wrote um and so I so yeah started at 20 then we went down to like maybe eight or nine tight writers who ended up doing a lot of stuff TJ Young who wrote six characters Julia who wrote like 10 characters um myself uh and then Suha with her massive 23 uh ended up being the uh the full full writer's room with myself as, as lead writer.

That's wild. Yeah, it's a lot.

We had a, we also, it's crazy that like been through the script so many times and there's still typos.

One of the things that took the longest, because Ink does not have spell check.

No, it doesn't. We had to put it all into 10 different, cause we maxed out Google docs.

So I had to put it into 10 different Google docs.

Because it can only do like 600.

Only 600 pages at a time.

But even then, it still took me a week to do the first spell check.

Because we have so many made -up -ass words in this and weird ways of talking.

Like Celia says, I am a ceiling of the world, you know.

Which makes no sense grammatically.

And we have tons of characters who talk in ridiculous ways.

Abel with his darn tootins and stuff.

stuff like that and made up words uh and uh and parody names uh so it took it took a full week of spellcheck and still uh man even after that i would still so maybe there's a thousand errors that uh that we fixed in between that and uh and where we are now uh and we still have on our on our very robust discord uh we have um maybe 40 outstanding typos that i have to put in the next couple of days uh it's uh i don't know will it ever be done i have no idea i can't believe i can't believe there's an hearing that you maxed out google docs to me feels like okay we found the end of the world and sailed

off of it like that's i didn't i did not realize that that was a possibility so new fear unlocked um 600 pages or so yeah god forbid so ton of writing ten of writing coding tags rule spell check everything and then the thing that has called many a thirsty fan to this game is your casting yes we also have all these voice actors yeah yes yeah them too them too i imagine or maybe you did when you first came up with this and you were kind of you and robbie were discussing were you like let's get everyone's favorite voice actors and basically basically create a thirst trap for money.

Was that like part of the pitch?

It was just like I said before, it was just our superpower that we like knew a lot of people.

And then we also had going into this, we knew that we wanted to make it union.

We and we wanted to pay residuals to our actors because we were this thing was built out of the fires of the first video game strike, which was a major part of which was about video game residuals, which we didn't really get unfortunately um we get like a couple hundred bucks after a game comes out which is nice i'm not complaining about that but it's not a true residual um and we were just like let's actually pay our actors uh union rate plus profit share uh the way that we want it to be um and i think uh that was uh that was something that made the casting of this more easy than not we had a most favored

nations contract where everybody worked for the same rate which i think made it a little bit easier to get our top tier talent to sign on because they're like, oh, if everybody's if this person is doing it for that rate, then I'll do it for scale to.

And but I think that only got us so far.

There were points where we had an extremely specific casting request. We have this Gaia is a Newfoundland accent, very strong Newfoundland accent and where do you find someone who can do that and so we found a lot of people who um are very much up -and -comers who i'm super super proud of like oz ryan who plays gaia uh lux uh the lamp is michael lores who's unbelievably talented uh just someone who elevates every single line uh he says i'm always always happy to hear a michael lores line read um to fill out the rest cast all of these um these lesser known talents to who i'm i'm super super proud

of we were able to give them a bigger stage to perform on so were there when you were like kind of writing these characters and coming up with them when you started making that spreadsheet of like here's the object and here's how we want them to sound did you start thinking like oh like laura would be perfect for this matt would be perfect for this or did sort of you created these characters and And then eventually you were like, oh, this person would actually be perfect for this.

Like, what was the.

Yeah, it really is.

It really was kind of half and half where some of them really obviously spoke to us.

And some we just we were like, well, we know we want to have Steve Blum in this.

But where we know that he can do a ton of different voices.

Where does he fit in?

So it was a big puzzle that we kind of filled in piece by piece and and made it work.

and for for myself I was always wall and always Scandalobra I love those two characters you're very very good as very good as Scandalobra thanks so like so like when you when you cast people like do you give Neil Newbon sides sorry Neil bringing you up again like do you just give him sides and go so you're a dryer like do like do you have yeah that was also another difficulty and making the game because we had no lead characters it meant we had to get everybody done one session at two at max because we didn't have the budget for it um so we had to meet the person make them feel at ease explain the entire

game and which is already batshit crazy and then explain their entire character which uh took up maybe about 20 minutes each session then we have to do that every single session so uh normally you have your lead characters and they you know They just go right to work and you're able to be super productive.

But for us, we were just hampered by that a little bit.

But thankfully, everyone seemed to have a really good time.

And somehow we got everybody recorded.

But yeah, explaining the character was always tough.

Neil and I actually go way, way back to 2016 when I flew out to audio motion in the UK because I wanted to have a motion capture reel.

And he was the teacher there.

um and uh we got to know each other then way back in the day so i'm super uh excited for his uh for his fame and glory that he has and uh he did an amazing job as our dryer he did i i i like those two characters i'm sad that he hates me already but maybe i can try again later um so so what would you say now that you've you've gone through that you started an indie studio you built what What you are describing is a proprietary narrative tool.

What? Yeah, you built a proprietary narrative tool, bruh.

You mean ink? No, like the way that ink talks to Unity.

Like the way that you built everything.

That's a tool. You built a tool.

I guess so. Yeah, you totally did.

What do you mean? I'm just using the things that were there.

I don't know. Oh, my God.

But like, but using them, using them in a, in a way that like, I, you know, I haven't, I haven't spoken to anyone else who has found a way to make ink work for a, you know, art, like a, a visual novel with a fuck ton of audio.

And like, this is, this is new ground.

This is really cool.

That's awesome. Well, I'm happy to share.

I don't think this is proprietary.

I think everyone should learn how to use this in a way that we did it.

Yeah. yeah I'm literally like I'm gonna drive up to your house and I want to look at your computer yeah I want to look at it I want to see it with my eyeballs I'm so fascinated thing right about about um words is where where's my properties this is a 38 megabyte file you don't even have have to drive up i'll just pop it on my phone oh my god the entire script of the game i want to see it so bad um yes yes please and thank you i'll trade you for a lot of wine um oh wait you know what it's it's not even that big because main .json is uh is like half of that so i think it's like maybe 10 10 gigabytes

yeah oh my god oh man i'm about to become insufferable thank you for that um I so so what is I I could ask the simple question which is like what is next but now that you kind of have I heard that but now that you know that you have the you know you are a dev now you you you did that you did the dev thing the pipeline worked and you have this this game that a lot of people are connecting with having a lot of fun with I think It's one of the most streamed dating games ever right now.

It is the most streamed dating game of all time.

It's crazy. So for you moving forward, what did you learn through this process that nuggets of wisdom that you would share with other people who want to just start an indie studio and make a game, who maybe are a little intimidated to jump into a program like Ink and just start working with it?

Like, what is your advice for those people?

Uh, that's a great question.

I don't know, uh, cause I certainly didn't do it in a healthy way.

Uh, I just kind of, I seem to be, uh, I seem to be motivated by conflict, by anger and by, um, frustration.

And I think I can, it just makes me go, ah, dang it.

I'll just, I'll just do it.

it. Um, and that kind of like got me through spite is a powerful motivator.

Um, and I think that worked for my personality, but I don't think it works for everybody.

Um, and I don't, I don't recommend it either.

I've certainly done a physical toll on my body.

I haven't been working.

I haven't been in touch with my body, uh, in, in a couple of years, uh, gained 50 pounds working on it.

That was the only way that I was like able to keep my sanity.

It was like, all right, just, just eat whatever gets you through it.

Uh, cause it'll be over soon and you have the rest of your life to figure it out.

Um, I don't know, not a healthy way.

I don't know. I don't know what the advice would be.

It would be like, uh, just do it if you want.

And if you don't want to don't do it, you don't have to make a video game.

Uh, and, uh, I don't know, treat people well.

I think it was nice to keep people on the team and keep them motivated.

I think by always praising what they've done, how far they've come, and motivate them to continue on this ridiculous scheme without burnout.

I don't think we had any burnout on our – I'm trying to think.

Like, literally, did we have anyone who was anyone like, I can't do this anymore?

I don't think anybody left. Yeah, none of our leads.

We did have a programmer who left. uh happens on every game i think they were that was somewhere someone where we made a mistake in in hiring someone who uh didn't quite have the um uh the veteran what is that called experience to deal with with how ridiculous the game came became um i think we had you know originally thought that this is going to be a lightweight game uh with with some funnier smaller characters and then when it became a ridiculous game i think they they got burned out for sure but uh i think that was the only casualty that we had which is which is pretty good considering the team

was maybe over 80 people so basically do as i say not as i do uh yeah that's exactly right oh boy but you did you you did do it and it's a thing and it's out there it's weird man it's It's really weird that we're sharing these characters with people like just being able to see them.

I have to say like fan art is really weird. I think a lot of people get a lot of developers talk about like, it's so weird to see your fan art in the wild.

And for me, what's really weird is I'm so used to the exact poses that we made for all of these characters.

And it's really weird to see them not doing the one pose that I've been looking at for so long.

It's like, Johnny Splash, you never stood like that before.

That's crazy. He's standing the wrong way.

That's always what's surreal to me.

I've seen some of the fan art, and it's probably just going to get dirtier over time, which is what you want.

Tata, really incredible.

Thank you for being just completely raw and just honest about this whole thing.

I wouldn't have done it if it wasn't you.

otherwise i'd be a lot more like ah yes it was a good time uh but because it's you i'm able to just be myself so thank you for that oh of course i appreciate it like we're obviously now like you'll never be rid of me because i will have more questions as i get farther and farther into the game and as i process everything that you've just told me um i think this is a really just good example of just like resilience and indie development and just trying new things so be proud.

Thank you. I'll be proud once we've fixed the, I think we have 300.

We went from on our Giro, we were down to 20 known bugs at release.

And now I think we're around 300.

And it's just like, all right, back to the mines, let's do it.

Let's get this thing over the finish line.

But I want this game to be pristine, where people can really, really, really trust it and feel like they can really experiment without feeling that there's dangerous bugs lurking around the corner.

Hey, there's a DLC idea, some bugs.

Yes, you can date the bugs in this game.

I don't know if you've met them.

No, not yet. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Amazing. Well, thank you.

I appreciate it. Absolutely.

Thank you for joining us for The Game Maker's Notebook.

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[From Voice Actor to Game Designer: The Insane Journey of 'Date Everything']-[How Ray Chase went from Actor to Game Developer with Date Everything]

📋 Summary

The Unlikely Creation of 'Date Everything'

The "Stupid" Genesis of a Massive Project

Technical Innovation: Teaching Ink to Talk

The Challenge of 100 Characters

Content Awareness and Ethical Design

Final Reflections on Indie Development

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript