Ian Moreno – The Behemoth Blog

As we were fleshing out more voices, Ian and I had both felt that unique voices for each of the main story’s heroes would be a cool thing to try. Ian gave Yosef a shot and we all unanimously loved it. It’s got a really fitting vibe for him.

Yosef is a demi-clops, meaning he’s part cyclops and part man. His past is somewhat mysterious as is his present. Meeting Yosef for the first time can be unnerving to some players. He’s always at the ready and seems questionably okay with just about anything that occurs. One subtle joke in Yosef’s design is that he prefers ranged attacks and yet he clearly lacks the depth perception required due to having just a single eyeball.

(See the introduction of the full Pit People VO Cast in “The Voices of Pit People“)

Dan and Ashly during a recording session in the Whisper Room

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.