voice actor – Page 3 – The Behemoth Blog

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

Generally speaking I like to give any creative person I’m working with a good amount of ‘room’. It creates the opportunity for the artist to breathe a lot of their own life into whatever they are doing. With Ashly, my approach remained the same. It’s always fun seeing someone knock stuff out of the park!

I went in very confident as I’ve known Ashly for years now and was certain she’d be able to nail the roles. The spectrum of characters we requested from her was pretty wide – there’s our iconic Recruitador Sofia, who wants to confidently claim everything on the planet for Spain in the gibberish form of the Spanish language. Then we have things like semi-creepy Spidaur ladies or partially insane Vampiresses. Then we have Hailey who has just the perfect amount of sass and tough love mixed together. I really couldn’t be happier.

There’s one recording Ashly made in particular that always makes me smirk a little when giving a female human a destination on the grid: “Ayyyyyyyyy..”

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.