In the upcoming sandbox dating sim, Date Everything, players will put on the “Dateviator” glasses and watch as everyday objects turn into romantic possibilities. Chat up the objects to reach one of three relationship statuses: Love, Friend, or Hate. We recently got to ask the Lead Designer at Sassy Chap Games and voice of the Wall, Ray Chase, a few questions about their ambitious debut title and how it has evolved over time. Here’s what they had to say!
Date Everything is a sandbox dating sim that lets you… Well date everything! The game was conceived as a fun side project among three voice actors, but where did the initial idea come from?
Chase: It all just began in the booth – Robbie and I were recording a show and were coming up with funny ideas for video games, and he said the immortal words “What about a game where you could just date… everything?” The next day I came to him and said I want to actually make that game, and the rest is history!
The game features an impressive voice cast, from Ben Starr and Ashley Burch to Matt Mercer and Laura Bailey. How did these collaborations come together? Was this always the intention?
Chase: We knew going into this that, being first-time game designers, we would have some initial drawbacks of simply never having made a game before. But, we also knew that we had some superpowers to make up for it – we had great relationships with artists like our eventual character designer and lead artist Erin Wong, and especially good relationships with a whooollleee lootttaa voice actors. And that allowed us to make the most stacked cast in indie game history!
Date Everything seems to be a massive undertaking with over 11,000 hand-drawn images and over 4 hours of music that includes themes for each dateable character. And that’s not even mentioning the 1.2 million-word script and 70,000 voice lines. How do you scope and plan a project of this size? Without losing your minds?
Chase: In the end, we have 13,000 images, 5 hours of music, and 1.6 million words! The scope of the project was a slow rise as iterations revealed some weak points for which the only solution was MORE ART and MORE DIALOGUE. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get through something like this with as small a team as we have without losing our minds – they are far, far gone at this point.
When you’re juggling so many romance plots (over 100 dateable characters), how do you keep them unique past appearance and puns alone?
Chase: This to me was the most important part of development – making sure that a game like this never gets tedious, and the simple recipe for that is always making sure the player is seeing something new. We had to go through a few drafts of some characters because there was too much overlap between stories, for sure. Thankfully, ink, our story programming language, was really good at allowing us to stretch our minds about how these stories played out – there’s a whole lotta non-linearity that can be juggled that way. We have characters that are really location specific (Dorian the Door, Curt and Rod the Curtains, etc) and they have different stories depending on which place you talk to them in! Finally, we have characters like Sinclaire, where one day I finally said, ‘what if one of them ISN’T a dateable object and is actually a human being cursed to be a sink?’ It’s things like that which I hope stave off any whiff of tedium in this game.
For four years, this was a part-time project where you built a vertical slice of the game. How did the team of “miscreants” stay motivated and keep the passion alive during the long pre-production process?
Chase: This was the time where we worked off and on whenever we found the time, and thankfully, we brought in Amanda Hufford, who was able to put together some really nice pitches and hooked us up with Team 17! But honestly, I don’t think that any of us really thought that it would get off the ground in the way that it ended up doing – it was always just a background ‘hey, that would be cool’ sorta feeling. It really does seem unbelievable that we actually pulled it off!
In 2022, Team17 joined the project as a publisher. Has anything significant changed from the vertical slice that was made originally?
Chase: The state that the game was in during the vertical slice was pretty wildly different than what we ended up going with – and that was awesome to get that feedback. We played around with a top-down perspective and gameplay that was more akin to an escape room and puzzle-solving. This kind of gameplay felt more frustrating than enjoyable, as there was a ‘right’ way of getting through some of the paths that seemed anathema to the more enjoyable parts of what our game ended up being – exploring, having fun, and choosing silly, flirting options.
Before the final question, we want to know about what was left on the cutting room floor. Were there any objects that you felt were too weird to include?
Chase: Anything that was weird made it into our game! We needed all the weird we could get. What didn’t make the cut were objects that simply had too much overlap – we had a lot of ‘cleaning’ characters at the start because that’s what large portions of a house just ARE – laundry room, bathrooms, closets…
So we joined soap and sink together to become Sinclaire and Sudsy the pup. We also had a plan to have Lights and Light be different characters, but that got too confusing pretty quickly as well.
Let’s step out of the game now. What item in your studio would catch your eye if you put on the Dateviators in real life?
Chase: Well, being that we already might have a dateable anime figurine in the game… I would have to say my microphone! I already have a really intimate relationship with him every day…
That brings us to the end of our interview. Thank you to Ray Chase for answering our questions and giving us a peek behind Curt and Rod. Date Everything will launch on June 17 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam. You can wishlist the game now on Steam to help out Sassy Chap Games. In the mood for more developer interviews? Then check out our interview with Laure De Mey, Creative Director of the botanical puzzle game Botany Manor.
