While our dev team is hard at work on our Pit People projects, our merch team has also been busy with their own creative project! The video below was shot and edited by our friend, Erik Derman, at a skate park in San Diego. We wanted to make a video that showcases how our boards are not just cool to look at but they are also functional pieces of art!
Why did we start making skate decks years ago? A story by the art director himself:
I didn’t expect to be filling any roles, especially one that started so tiny. We needed something for an Emissary conveying story things to you in the introduction part of the game. As we added features, the Emperor’s Orders missions appeared in Update 3. Now the Emissary is with you throughout your expeditions!
Even though the recording was initially assumed to be temporary I still had a tough time with this guy. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted him to sound like. I almost wanted him to be someone that you want to punch in the face due to coming off as judgmentally classist. It didn’t really end up that way, but I like where it landed.
After about 10 to 15 attempts, the shnooky-pooky binky-bong-bong line was me throwing my hands in the air and re-inventing my approach all together. The trick was making the gibberish much more formal sounding along with saying the stupidest words that came to mind. When Stamper laughed along with a good number of playtesters, I felt pretty good about leaving the recording as it was.
The Emissary sports both highs and lows in his voice, which makes it difficult for me to make additional lines for him. His signature “thing” is his high-pitched throat clear.
You can hear some of the raw recording from the first session below, some outtakes, one of the final versions of a line, and a bonus clip with the cow poop sounds!
The idea of a voice actor cast is both humorous and daunting within the context of The Behemoth and the breadth of games we’ve worked on. At one point it’s non-existent, at another very minimal, and then eventually it became the most amazing narration, to me at least, I had ever encountered. It’s safe to say Will Stamper’s BattleBlock Theater (BBT) narration is something special on multiple levels. From the writing to the humor and to even the tears. To watch this finely tuned levity weave its way throughout the game with surgical precision, it would be hard to think it was, well, a layer that came much later in the development process.
With Pit People, the process drastically differed from that of BBT in many ways. The gameplay, the story, the voices, the look; everything was started more or less in tandem. There are probably a bunch of interviews of me talking about Dan Paladin’s sketchbook containing these teams with minimal UI. I’ll be clear, that came first, but what followed was not only quick, and to put simply with a term easily overused within these walls… organic.