Feature: "You've Gotta Make It More Sexy" - Final Fantasy & Persona Voice Actors Have Made A Dating Sim For Everyone

I first caught wind of Date Everything! last year, when an animated trailer showcased a dating sim unlike anything I'd ever seen. What do you mean a humanoid fridge, grand piano, and front door can woo me? And, more pressingly, how are they all so hot?

As it turns out, that title is both an invitation and a promise. Just about every household object has been reimagined in hunky humanoid forms and even the metaphorical gets in on some lovin', with glitches, existential dread, and the game itself making up a roster of 100 dashing dateables.

It comes from Sassy Chap Games, a fresh studio formed by a team of voice actors with credits spanning the likes of Final Fantasy, Persona, and Fire Emblem, and, rather fittingly, it features some top-drawer voice talent to match. Go on, think of a gaming voice actor right now. They're probably in this.

Ahead of its 17th June release, I was lucky enough to sit down with three of the game's developers and voice actors — Ray Chase, Robbie Daymond, and Amanda Hufford — to talk dating, delays and sexy character design. So, brush your hair, put on a clean shirt and grab a bunch of roses, it's time to get dating...

Nintendo Life (Jim Norman): Congratulations on Date Everything! How does it feel to finally be so close to launch?

Robbie Daymond: A combination of excited and relieved, for sure.

Ray Chase: Vomiting at all hours!

Robbie: I don't know if we want to start this interview with "vomiting at all hours," but yeah, it's exciting. We worked on it for a long time, it feels amazing.

Ray: It is super exciting. It's our first game, so the whole process has been a great learning curve. I was saying to my wife, who's also a developer on this game, this is such an interesting time before we unleash our beautiful little babies onto the world. We've had all these inside jokes, all these wonderful characters that we've been keeping to ourselves for seven years, and we're just a couple of weeks out from everybody knowing all those secrets.

Amanda Hufford: We've spent so much time with these characters in our heads, and these are the only people we've been able to share them with. I feel like I've talked about them like they're real for the last several years, and now, finally, they get to be real. I just hope that the audience connects with them as much as we want them to.

I'm currently running the Instagram, so I get all of the comments and notifications when a video gets posted. Seeing everybody's reactions and how excited the talent is, how they're wanting to engage with the game and somehow already-existing fan community, is so heartening.

This game is bonkers! How did it come about?

We had this moment where it was sitting on the shelves for six months, and we got really sad

Robbie: Me, Ray, and Max Mittelman [the third member of Sassy Chap and fellow voice actor] decided we wanted to make something. We had a ton of stuff in development. Some things went, and some things didn't — we did a really fun, successful narrative podcast (Xeno Realms: Sky Brother Force), then we had a million ideas that got shelved. But I felt like Ray always had this inkling to do a game. He was going to GDC and PAX and these other events for a while, and we were like, 'Well, what kind of game do we wanna make?'

Ray: We weren't really thinking of games to make or coming up with silly ideas. We were joking around in the booth one day while we were recording a show, and Robbie just said, 'Well, what about a game where you can date everything? I don't know, date that lamp, date that table?' I jokingly said, 'Yeah, absolutely,' but then thought to myself, 'I think I can do that.' And then Sassy Chap was born.

We took about four years making the vertical slice and trying to get funded. The other three were working hand in hand with [publisher] Team17 to get it across the finish line.

Robbie: A few of those years in the middle were peak COVID. So we had a little pause, we retooled the vertical slice, and changed our team around.

I feel like we were firing on all cylinders in the beginning, and then we got slowed down when publishers stopped taking pitches. We had this moment where it was sitting on the shelves for six months, and we got really sad about it. It was such a strong concept, and our slice was so good. We got some offers that we didn't love and didn't take before that, so when we decided to bring it back to life, it was really exciting because it brought new blood into it.

I often think about how many people got disheartened during that period and abandoned projects. I'm really glad we revisited something that we felt strongly about and found the right team to move it forward.

"Everything" means that there are no limits, but it also means that there are no limits. How did you know when to stop?

Ray: Most of the design aspects were just from the title. It was [a question of] 'How do we live up to this title so that everybody who plays this game says, "I did indeed date everything and I got my money's worth."'

I felt like 100 had to be the number from the get-go. It's just such a sexy number, an impossible number. Then we just started going around our houses naming things, and found out quickly we had way over 100. And we wanted stuff where you can date the game itself, date rejection, and date concepts. We had way more ideas than we thought, and we knew that we wanted around 10% of them to be objects that didn't have forms or would be really surprising. So that was definitely a process right from the get-go.

Everybody who left the session was like, 'That's the most fun I've had in years!'

Robbie: Choosing the environment was also a huge factor when we finally came up with the concept. So when we finally landed on someone who's a bit of a shut-in and doesn't get out too much, [we knew] there's not only your plot, but your mechanism as well. This is someone who, by choice, doesn't leave their house.

Very early in development, it had escape room elements in it. You were being held in your house by a force, and the object was to get out. We did that in our vertical slice, and it just wasn't fun. We were like, 'Oh, this feels bad. It's too linear and too many pieces have to go together.'

So we went with this idea of making it a sandbox. You can leave at any time, but the ending that you're gonna get is not great, depending on how it happens.

You have an Avengers: Endgame-sized roster of voice artists on the project. How did you decide who was going to voice each character? Was it a case of going, "Well, we have a door, so that has to be Ben Starr"?

Robbie: You used two really apropos metaphors and examples there. With Avengers, we knew as developers that the voiceover community was our superpower. We thought we could probably put in some phone calls and get some people who might not normally do this type of game as a concept — even though we feel like we have executed at a higher level than has been done before. Everybody who left the session was like, "That's the most fun I've had in years!"

And the second part is, no, it wasn't always Ben Starr, because it was originally me in the verticals! We finished the slice, and I just thought there's somebody better for this. Not that I felt I was bad or didn't like my performance, but we wanted all the casting to be perfect.

The actual casting process was something that Ray and I pored over for hundreds of hours. Of all the hundreds of voice actors that we know, who would be the best fit? What about the ones that we don't? There were some really complicated riddles to unlock with who the voice of these characters was gonna be.

Ray: This game was very stupid to make. Everybody told us that this is a terrible idea. We were making a game that's hugely asset-driven, where you're not able to make a core gameplay loop that feeds into itself. Every single thing had to be written and recorded, every character had to have a separate piece of music, all of this wild stuff. It also meant, on the voice acting side, unlike most games that have a core group of voice actors who carry the burden, it's 100 main characters who all have equal burden.

I don't think we could have afforded to make this game without the ion that the voice actors put in

We reached out to a casting director friend and asked how hard it is to cast 100 actors. She was like, "Impossibly hard. No game does that." You usually send out auditions for like 10 or 15 of your main characters, and then you get the smaller characters from a group of people that you've worked with before or do ad hoc auditions. For us, so much of that weight of casting fell on using our intuition; for some of our more specific acting requirements, we did your traditional casting by sending out sides and listening to hundreds of auditions and picking your best one. We found a lot of surprises that way.

Robbie: We also have a lot of unique archetypes and backgrounds for all of our characters, and we wanted to make sure that our casting was not only representative but authentic. There were some characters that were so obscure to a Western audience that we had to go on a hunt to find somebody who could play this part accurately. It was a really fun challenge, if not a little bit hair-pulling at times. But I'm completely proud of everyone's work.

Like Ray said, this game's super asset-heavy, and that boils down to our performances as well. Because this is a medium-budget game, a lot of these actors had to output in these sessions. They had to do five, six, 700 lines in the course of four hours. So not only did it require correct casting, it required a level of specific skill for video games that is just top-level. I don't think we could have afforded to make this game without the ion that the voice actors put in.

I won't ask you to pick out a favourite character, but is there a performance that really sticks in your mind as being especially fun?

Robbie: 'All of them' is such a cop-out answer, but I think everybody crushed so hard because they're having fun.

Ray: We had a lot of people who were cast against type, who were just so happy. Ali Hillis, who's known for these suave characters with this deeper, sexier voice like Lightning [from Final Fantasy XIII] and Liara from Mass Effect, we cast her as Maggie, our magnifying glass, who's kind of this dorky little gumshoe, trying to find out all the mysteries around the house. Ali was just over the moon to be like, 'Oh wow, this is not what I normally do.'

Same with David Sobolov, who's normally your deeper-voiced guy and plays bigger monster characters. We cast him as Washford the washing machine, who is super eloquent, very poetic, and he got to really stretch his acting muscles in ways he missed doing. So the gratitude that we got from a lot of people was wonderful.

Robbie: I loved everybody, but I'll mark a couple of my Tabletop RPG friends. Matt Mercer came in to play the D20. He's arguably the most famous Game Master in the world [thanks to Critical Role], and we wanted him to play a guy who was lonely and nervous because he has no one to play his TTRPG with. So I was like, 'You got to cut back on the confidence. You gotta be a good GM, but...' and he's like, 'No worries, I'll just I'll just harken back to high school'. So he tapped into his nerdy, player-less GM really quickly!

Brennan Lee Mulligan came in to play our board games; it was his first video game performance ever, and he absolutely crushed! He was just as fast, skilful, and fun as any of our lifetime pros. Those experiences were extremely rewarding to me from a friend and human-to-human standpoint.

Amanda: It's hard because that was truly every session. I could list anyone. The most incredible part, to me, was going to each of those sessions and getting to see all of the actors' different processes. Voice acting can be so isolating. I come from stage and musical theatre, so I'm used to playing with people, reacting with people. So when I got into voice acting, that was the thing I missed the most.

right from the get-go, there were details in there that made us laugh and were super creative

That was such a beautiful part of this. The way that we ran our sessions [meant that] we really did scenes together. When directing, Robbie and I would play the player character's lines, and the talent would get to react to us. There was such magic there because that's not something we get very often. A lot of the cast agreed on how wonderful that was to get to play with somebody.

To nail it down to a single performance is tough. I have to highlight Ray, Robbie, and Max. They were all brilliant! Watching each of them was so much fun, and they're so vastly different in the way that they perform and interact with their own characters, and the nuances they brought with their humour and timing.

From an art design perspective, what was the process of making each character unique? And, perhaps more importantly, how did you make them all so hot?

Robbie: Oh man, that's such a good question! All the credit has to go to Erin Wong, our lead character designer. She would create a round of sketches with three to six ideas per character, then Ray and I would work with her to figure out what aspects from each we wanted. We had a framework of maybe background, location, gender, that sort of thing, but outside of that, it's all her. She's so fast and skilful and creative, such a master of fashion and form. It made our job easy because there was an embarrassment of riches.

Ray: She has such a sense of humour, and that's such a rare thing in an artist. We're going to have an art book for our DLC, and you'll be able to see a lot of these very first designs for some of the characters. Because you're staring at these guys for such a long time, some of these details aren't even apparent at first. After an hour of looking at them, you're like, 'What? Look at that tattoo, I never even noticed that,' or, 'Oh, that's what that hat pin is!' Very, very clever. We are absolutely blessed to have her.

Robbie: Unfortunately, at some point, I ended up as the 'sexy' sheriff. Not the 'Sexy Sheriff', but the 'sexy' sheriff — there's a difference. We wanted to express sensuality and attractiveness across all gender types, body types and backgrounds, to make sure there was something for everybody to enjoy. But it always felt like I was saying, 'Can we make this a little hotter here?' About halfway through development, I said, 'Ray, you've gotta make it more sexy for me. It can't be me all the time. I feel like it's a me problem!'

And there are so many of them! You have 100 characters and they have three endings each, is that correct?

Ray: At least three. Even the word 'ending' is a little bit [misleading] just because we haven't really... how to tease this? You ain't seen nothing yet! There is a whole other expression of these characters that has yet to be figured out, and a whole mechanic that will open up that allows that to happen.

There's so much more for people to see. I love the community developing around it, trying to figure things out and how close they are. Then a lot of times, it's like, 'Oh man, you got it totally wrong!' I can't wait for them to see the truth.

It's amazing what the community can do once the Discord is set up.

Robbie: I think one of the saddest things that was semi-abandoned in the mid-2010s was this idea of figuring out problems via mass sources. They would release a medical problem to the public, and it would always be some gamer who would figure out the answers.

So we're ready for them to figure out the Easter eggs.

With so many characters and branching narratives, what was the writing process like?

Ray: Our game is written in an incredibly simple yet effective language called Ink, made by [Inkle] the people who made 80 Days. It was quite a learning curve for all of us who had no previous experience doing game design or story programming.

Even though it was a seven-year process, a lot of that first vertical slice was us trying to see if the tech could work. But once we got funded by Team17, it was off to the races, bringing in a huge team of writers, all from diverse backgrounds, who could bring a lot of life and language into this, and learn Ink at the same time.

we can never make another game like this again

We also had to figure out what the rules of this game are. What does it mean to date someone? How do we ensure all these characters don't overlap with each other? These were the challenges we had to face, and up until the very end, we were always writing. Even the unvoiced stuff. There are huge hint systems, there's a journal, there's an 'Examine' function that changes based on your playthrough. It was a lot of writing, but I think we succeeded in making all these characters feel unique, and stories that continually surprise.

Robbie: It started with a small team of six for the vertical slice and early development. Then we expanded, and we had as many as 25 writers at a certain point. We got to hear all their voices and made sure that our characters were represented by writers of a similar background. We're really proud of that.

After that, Ray (as head writer) and a small team of writers came in from all backgrounds. We had college theatre professors, writers from film and television, narrative designers, and they punched up all of the scripts while maintaining those original writers' voices so that they could function within the game that Ray was deg.

There was a short period where it was just Ray in the trenches, making sure we had material that worked, while simultaneously having a crew inside the voiceover studio working eight hours a day, recording 70,000 lines, making sure that we didn't miss anything because if we did, it would cost us thousands of dollars as we're a full union game.

We wanted to make a genuine game

We're so proud of what we came up with. It was an amazing process and Ray in particular sacrificed so much time and energy into making this game, even though he loves it. I'll be the first one to give him just an incredible amount of kudos for how hard he worked.

But we can never make another game like this again. If there are any hopeful developers listening to us, going, 'If those guys can do it, I can do it,' no, you can't. It'll kill you, it'll ruin your life, don't do it like this.

Ray: We really are the only people who could make this game. There are so many weird superpowers we had that all came together: us knowing a lot of different artists from the convention scene, knowing a lot of different voice actors, being able to make a deal with a union so that we can pay our voice actors residuals.

For some reason, I'm just good at story programming. I think we have 2,000 different story variables, and I was able to program all that stuff while deg a core narrative that worked at the same time. [It was] a bizarre confluence of talents to be able to make this ridiculous game.

Robbie: When you work this long on something with people that you respect and trust, you figure out what you're good at. You have to be honest with yourself and malleable about what that is while you're making something that requires so many moving parts. It was definitely an experience.

How important was it for you to make a dating game for everyone?

Robbie: We had discussions very early on about what the essence of the dating sim is. We didn't want it to be token-based, where you're just trying to date everything to get an ending and that's the only way to go about something. We didn't think that would feel very good.

So we asked, 'Why are we making this game?' and it is to tell these stories and have it be a real dating simulator. Every time you go on a date and meet a new person, if you're interested in getting romantically involved with them, 99.9% of the time it doesn't pan out until you meet your person. You could date a hundred people and only find one that you love, or you can love them all in a different way.

That was the genus of the Love/Friendship/Hate system, where we said, "That's just not the way life turns out." You can date someone and be like, 'Man, I really hate this person. It's the worst thing I ever did.' That's rare, but most of the time you stay friends with them, and sometimes you fall in love. That allowed us to tell stories based around the framework of dating that didn't pen us into having love as the be-all and end-all.

I've been watching people play for 15-20 hours, and it seems like they're not even scratching the surface

Amanda: That's one of the things that pulled me to this idea when talks began, the idea that everybody could be seen and heard. I think there are a lot of games and projects that try to make an effort to give people the visibility they deserve, but it's difficult. It's so hard to understand so many different, diverse perspectives; you can only have so many people on your team, and sometimes it just falls short. They make this genuine effort, but it doesn't actually reach the people it was meant for. If there's one strength that you could say about this thing, it would be the number of people who have put themselves into it. Their vision, their story, their personal experiences.

As a queer person myself, it was really important to me that we made sure to touch on not just one queer experience, but that we made space for so many different voices, so nobody felt like, 'Oh I don't fit that singular box of queerness, femininity, or any one thing, so the thing they tried to give me didn't count'.

All the characters, the stories they go through, and the experiences the writers genuinely and generously shared with us speak a little bit to everybody. And that is so satisfying to be able to say.

Ray: In Western dating sim tradition, there's a sense of cheekiness and parody that's always around, and we did not want to lean into that too much. We wanted to make a genuine game. The playtime is absolutely enormous. You're spending so much more time with this than you would a parody dating sim.

There's not very much parody in this game at all. This is an earnest attempt at directly acknowledging these things exist, in a more earnest way than a lot of the other Western titles do.

Robbie: Early on in our announcement cycle, the more traditional dating sim fans were like, 'Oh no, another Western satire parody sim.' I can understand that because our goal was to subvert that expectation and we hadn't shown enough of the game for them to get it.

Some people picked up on it. They were like, 'Boy, 70,000 lines sure sounds like a lot for a person. I feel like there's something more here.' I think that narrative in the dating sim community has been put to bed. I've been watching people play for 15-20 hours, and it seems like they're not even scratching the surface.

Ray: It's hard to estimate, but one full playthrough seems to be around 20-25 hours.

Robbie: I guess it depends how quickly you play. I watched somebody play it for like 12 hours, and they only got through 20 dateables.

Robbie and Ray, you both have experience voicing Fire Emblem characters, one of the few Nintendo series concerned with romance. Was there anything from Fire Emblem, or from any other titles, that informed your approach to writing a good romance?

Robbie: That's a really good question. We were inspired by narrative choices from video games more than [just] dating sims. I played more dating sims in research for this project than I had in life! I wanted to treat it more like a real-life engagement with some fun storytelling.

Ray: You just have to draw from so many sources. You can draw from traditional dating sim sources, from novels you've read. There are so many different ways that we wanted to tell all these different stories that I can't pinpoint it down to one thing.

As far as Fire Emblem is concerned, nobody dies in this game, thankfully! There's no permadeath, and no combat. We're okay.

With so much going on, how does the Switch version hold up?

Ray: We designed for the Switch version. Team17 has a lot of console experience and handled the porting. Every time we made any decision based on graphical capabilities, we had to prioritise the Switch first, to make sure that it ran the same there as it did everywhere else.

Thankfully, with their experience, we were able to make a sleeker game that catered to all of Nintendo's quirks. Obviously, the Switch 2 has been announced and will be coming out soon. I do think that we will make a port one day for it, but it won't be at launch, for sure.

The game has seen a couple of delays now. What was the thing that made you realise, 'Okay, we need to push this for a little bit,' and did that impact your plans?

Ray: It was heartbreaking, of course. We were really excited about the Valentine's Day [release date], it seemed perfect. But this was a very challenging game to make and test. In a lot of games, you're able to at least see the core gameplay loop work in one level at a time. But this is a sandbox game where you can play all of these dateables in any order you want. There are mechanics that allow you to mess stuff up by design to make things a lot more fun.

It was absolutely a blessing that we had the delay

We had an idea of how big this game is, but when it actually came down to brass tacks and playing all of the different playthroughs, Team17 had to put in a lot more resources than they had originally envisioned towards QA and bug fixing.

This was the most difficult part of production, where it was just myself working on all of the bugs along with the remaining programming team. Every day, we had maybe a hundred bugs that we had to get through. A lot of them were small ones, but they would be very noticeable to a player because the art is displaying incorrectly, or the wrong voice line is playing. And because there are so many assets in this game, having to check every single one just took a really long time.

It was absolutely a blessing that we had the delay to make sure that everything was ironed out and gone through. There are so many weird ways of playing, and so many false positives where something might look like it's working, but you're skipping large portions of the dialogue. Those kinds of things are very hard to find.

Amanda: The most important thing is that Ray be recognised for what he did during this time. Ray's an incredibly talented human being, but through the course of this game, he went from being a fantastic actor and a writer to being our programmer, and doing a lot of stuff that was out of his original purview. It's because of him taking on all of these challenges, seeing something and going, 'I don't know how to do that, I don't know how to fix it, but I'm going to figure it out,' that this game is still good. He put so much into it.

Truly, Ray, what you've done is mind-blowing to me, and what you've done specifically in the delay time has made the game so beautiful.

Ray: Thank you, I really appreciate that.

We love teams that can finish a game together and still be friends!

Ray: Yeah, be friends and make a lot of friends. There are so many awesome people who I got to work with. I've met more people than I had before, and I'm so happy to have them as part of my orbit.

And finally, what's next for Sassy Chap Games?

Amanda: The world is our oyster. We have talked about so many ideas for DLC or more within the Date Everything IP, but we've also talked about completely new things, doing something totally different that nobody would expect.

We have this really fantastic energy within the team to simply create, to put new ideas out there and ask, 'Well, what do we want to do? Where does your heart lie?' and not, 'What do we think everybody's gonna wanna see? What do we think needs to follow this?' Everyone is so on board, so we have a good list of things we're batting around and talking internally about other people's ideas for games. It's really great to see everybody investing.

That's what games are missing right now. A lot of people are focused on the business of it, but we lose a lot of what calls people to games in the first place. I think many are craving that right now. People want to see that heart, ion and beauty in those original stories. And I think Sassy Chap is here to tell them.

Ray: People are starting to get that this is a game about inanimate objects, but it is one of the most human games ever made. It is a very firmly anti-AI sort of game. It is all about these unbelievable, specific pieces of art, music, and voice acting that could never have been made with AI. I couldn't imagine the level of computing needed to get even one of Erin's designs, or the absolute weirdness of the writing and the way we're telling all of these stories.

That is an ethos that we're going to keep with this company forever. That's never going anywhere.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Thank you to Robbie, Ray, and Amanda for taking the time to talk to us. Date Everything launches on Nintendo Switch on 17th June.