“We played it and we asked the to mimic the acting for these lines so that we kept the same quality. “Because we spent so much time polishing the acting and the chemistry between the characters for the new couples, we actually played the original lines for each recorded line,” Thoa says.
This helped unify the different versions of Yu and Kay, even if they were of different genders and played by different actors. With Kendrick and Highley, The Game Bakers sought to recreate the same performance dynamics, which meant asking them to emulate Lew Kum Hoi and Harouni’s delivery. We took a really long time to ensure it was of excellent quality.” So we had that, we had an audio director guiding them, and we rehearsed the dialogues and recorded. People don’t play they read dialogue lines from an Excel sheet. But in my experience it’s super, extra rare. “Which is, I mean, probably other games have done that before. “For the original couple, first we did a very long casting, then we had both Chris and Janine come to the studio together to rehearse and together,” he explains. But it was hard to precisely replicate everything that made female Yu and male Kay’s performances so intertwined. When it came to recreating the performances, The Game Bakers sought to capture the same chemistry of the original opposite-sex pairing with new actors Lexie Ann Kendrick and Ryan Highley. These are expressed in some presentational changes, from loading screen art and menus that can now feature the same-sex versions of both characters to the 80,000 lines re-recorded to accommodate all three pairings. It was worth it, no question.”īut for all the technical overhaul the player would never see, the core of what it means for the player is how they relate to Yu and Kay’s strife and joys as a couple. We are moving on and very happy to have done it. And yeah, it’s been a bit exhausting, but now it’s done. While you develop the game, you have to test that hundreds of times. The thing that’s never talked about in any post-mortem feature is also all the QA that goes with that.
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“So a lot of backend code and organization of the assets, and just supporting the feature. “There were the assets, but there was a lot of work to make the game work with these new couples,” Thoa says. Thoa explains it was more than just swapping models and voice acting - it was baked into the code of Haven. This includes things both apparent and invisible to the player. Since the relationship between Yu and Kay is the core of Haven, it meant the team had to overhaul several aspects to create a cohesive experience for each version of them. But obviously, with eight couples it would have been a different game.”Īfter Haven launched in 2020, The Game Bakers took about a year to develop the Couples Update. So we wanted to really put that at the core of the gameplay. “Because that’s not very frequent, or most of the time it’s treated like a love interest but it’s not really important. “There were different ideas, always with the same intention of exploring a love relationship in a video game,” Thoa tells Fanbyte. But according to Creative Director Emeric Thoa, the central love story was always a pillar the team wanted to explore in whatever form Haven took. This allowed the team to focus on two defined characters and their relationship to each other and the world around them. As the scope for the project scaled back, the story had to change alongside it. This cast included relationships of different make-ups, ages, and even non-romantic dynamics, as among them were two sisters. Yu and Kay were initially only one of eight different pairings that the studio intended to let players pick between.
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While the update’s development took over a year of the studio’s time, the team feels like Haven has reached its full potential as a universal story about love, rebellion, and doing right by queer fans who felt alienated by the original story.įor The Game Bakers, this is the actualization of an aspect of Haven’s original pitch. Those allegories are more apparent than ever with the Couples Update, which adds a male version of Yu and a female version of Kay, letting the player choose one of three versions of the lovers. On its face, it’s a universal truth relatable to anyone with romantic leanings, but it’s hard to ignore the real-world parallels this situation has to queer relationships. It’s a tragic, yet hopeful story of choosing to defy the safety of abiding by a system in pursuit of true love. The original RPG centers around a woman named Yu and a man named Kay, a couple on the run from a system that would keep them apart. Last week, indie developer The Game Bakers updated Haven to allow players to play a same-sex version of its central romance.