Triple Click - Date Everything! (with Ray Chase)

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Kirk, Jason, and Maddy bring on special guest Ray Chase (Final Fantasy XV, Play Nice) to talk about his experiences as a voice actor and his new game, Date Everything! Ray talks about how he came up with the game, the seven-year saga of building it, and how it's so much more than a romance simulator.One More Thing:Kirk: The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)Maddy: I quit Polygon lolJason: Marble Hall Murders (Anthony Horowitz)LINKS:Kirk’s new collection “Music For Podcasting”: https://kirkhamilton.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-podcastingKindness Coins: https://arden.itch.io/kindness-coins“Why AI Isn’t Going To Make Art” by Ted Chiang for The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-artTriple Click LIVE in Portland, July 11: https://albertarosetheatre.com/event/triple-click-live/alberta-rose-theatre/portland-oregon/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

If you've ever walked around your house and thought, hey, this piano is pretty cool, but I wish that I could have a date with it. Here's the game for you. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the dates to you. This week, we are talking to Ray Chase, prolific voice actor and the director of a new video game called Date Everything. Let's do it. I'm Jason Shrier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome back. Hello, my best gamer friends. It's so nice to see you both. The best of all. We are the best of all. We have a special guest today, which is going to be very exciting. I'm very excited to talk to him. But before we get to that, we have some other things to talk about, including the fact that we are a listener supported podcast. That's right. You may have heard. Triple Click is supported by listeners just like you who go to Maximum Fund. join and become a max fun member. And in addition to making this podcast possible, you also get bonus episodes every single month, including one we just did where we dig a deep dive into blueprints

and including one we are about to do at the end of June where we talk about season two of Andor, the new Star Trek show. Live long and prosper. If you want to hear those episodes and many, many more, go to maximum fun.org slash join, become a member, support this show. One more thing is that we will be doing a live show that is coming up very soon in Portland, Friday, July 11th of the Alberta Rose Theater.

If you would like to buy a ticket, you can buy it in the show notes. The link is in the show notes. Reserve your seat. I believe it's a little more expensive at the door. So if you do want to come, make sure you get your ticket in advance. And Kirk, one more thing for you before we bring in our special. special guests. Yes, one more thing for me is that I have finally put together all of the podcast music that I've written over the last 10 or so years, most of them in the last five years,

and made them into a little album that is now for sale on my band camp page. It is called Music for Podcasting. Great title. And it's got all kinds of themes from shows that I have hosted and also other people's shows that they've hired me to write. A bunch of different musicians. It actually features Jason and Maddie, of course, on the Triple Click theme. And a bunch of other great musicians. and it was fun to finally put it together. I don't know. So I just wanted to let everyone know. It's on my bandcamp page.

We'll put a link in the show notes. Check it out and, you know, buy some MP3s from me if you feel like it. All right. Well, we've got a very special interview slash guest host slash whatever you want to call it. We got a guy. We got a guy coming on. So without further ado, let's bring in our pal, Ray Chase. And we are joined by Ray Chase.

Ray Chase is a prolific voice actor who is best known. as the narrator of Blood Sweat and Pixels, press reset, and play nice, but also he did some Final Fantasy and X-Men and Resident Evil things. Ray, how are you? Hi, I'm so, so happy to be here. A long-time listener, first-time caller. It's truly an honor. I'm just absolutely happy to be here. I'm big, big fans.

It's exciting to have you. So you and Ben Starr, both lovely people, both voice actors, both Final Fantasy stars, both triple-click listeners. which I appreciate. We love games, man. I mean, one of the things that, like, I really loved talking to him when I saw that he was cast and promoting and played games, I'm like,

he's a real freaking gamer. One of us, man. Let's do it. Yeah, that really matters. He is a true nerd. Yeah. So, Ray, so we have you on here. We're going to talk a little bit

about voice acting in general, but most importantly, you have a new game that comes out this week as we are airing this. Ray, tell us about your game, which is called Date Everything. On the triple scale of names, by the way, this gets to 10. 0.10. Tell us about Date Everything. It's pretty good.

Yeah, solid name. Thank you. I have to say, like, that name was what guided the whole thing. I was, I was not had a, I was not a video game developer, but I was also really interested, I was always really interested in indie games specifically. I went to GDC for the last 15 years, just always. Anytime I was in a game, I was, I just wanted to meet the developers. see what that was like and play their games and play the lesser known titles that took risks with what a game could be and expanded the scope of what this amazing interactive media can can do. And the title was just a funny title that Robbie and I came up with during a voiceover session about like, what about a game where you could just date everything? I don't know. And then I thought

about it for that night, came back to him and said, I want to make that game. I think I want to do that. And it has been a seven-year journey of trying to make something that lives up to that title. That's so interesting. Robbie being, of course, Robbie Damon, your fellow voice actor who worked on this game with you. Yeah, Goro Ocatching Persona, Prompto and Final Fantasy. He's on Critical Role. So you guys started seven years ago, which is before the pandemic. Oh, yes, I know.

This is a very pandemic-coded game in the sense that you can't leave your house. And we were highly aware of that. Yeah, we started in June 17th, 2018, was when I sent the first email to Adrile Wallach, who was our lead programmer for the vertical slice. And almost seven years to the day, we'll be releasing June 17th, 2025. Can I take a crack at explaining what this game is? Yes, we're talking about these. I mean, we could get Ray's description, but I feel like I can, maybe I can try and you can

correct me if I'm wrong about anything. Essentially draft rooms in a house and you're trying to get to room 46 in our game. Right. And it's harder than you think. Right. It's harder than you think. Right. It's harder than you think. More to it.

The real date, everything begins when the credits rule. So I've played a bit of this and I find it very funny, delightful and yes, very pandemic-coded and sort of intriguingly dystopian. Yes. I don't know if you would use that word, but it is actually, there's a bit of darkness underneath it. But you're working for essentially an Amazon-like mega-corporation. You're working remotely from this house where you have been pulling.

put up by the company, and then you are your first day of work, I think. You're laid off and replaced by an AI and put into job limbo, sort of like some of these corporations have where they don't want to lay you off without cause, so you're just kind of working for them, but you have nothing to do. And at the same time that this happens, you get a mysterious delivery at your house, and it's a pair of augmented reality glasses. They're pretty fashionable, and you put them on, and the glasses themselves take the appearance of a cute girl, and they start talking to you, and they say,

there. What's up? I'm the glasses. But I'm here to tell you about dating. What are they called? Wait, now I'm forgetting the name. They have a very funny name. The glasses. They're called dateviators. Thank you. They're aviator glasses, but you can use them to date things. So then you walk around this house that you are not actually trapped in, but you can't leave because if you leave, the glasses would be powered down because they're like proto-tech or whatever. And you can just look at any item in the house. You hold down the trigger, at least for me is the trigger. I'm playing on Steam Deck. and the item sort of manifests into a character that looks like a dating sim character with, you know, a really striking look and fun music and a whole vibe and a weird energy or whatever.

And they're all very, very different. So you go talk to your piano and the piano is this musician who is performing a version of John Cage's 433. That's actually 33 seconds long. And I appreciated that joke very much as like one of the very first jokes that I encountered in the game. I was like, I'm a big classical music head. There's a lot in a lot of cool references and a concerto, a full-on concerto that plays at a certain. Oh, wow. Okay.

I haven't gotten to that yet. Which, I mean, we should say it's like 33 seconds of silence that you have to go through while you talk to this. It's amazing. It's amazing. Yes. And it's by, I believe, John Gage. So, 433 is a famous John Cage piece that is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. It's very provocative when it was composed.

There's actually an episode of the podcast, 20,000 Hertz, about it. So anyhow, that's the premise. And then you go around and you kind of date the things in your house that are maybe being projected as artificial intelligence. Like, you know, you can almost imagine this being a real thing in the world, the where you play. And that's what begins to feel a little bit dystopian, even though it's a very cheery and funny game. So that's the basic outline of the game. How did I do? Well done.

It's very funny that you guys came up with this pre-pandemic because it's so like you're stuck at home. You imagine dating things in your house. You started. You're so lonely. Suddenly your TV remote is actually telly. It's got to be six feet apart from everybody. But like that table's looking really good. So, right, tell us a little bit more.

I mean, so you and Robbie, you're just voice actors. You're not game developers or at least you weren't when you started on this journey. How do you even start the process of saying, oh my God, we have this idea. We have this title, date, everything. Let's turn that into an actual video game. What was that like for you? It was a really long path, and I definitely took more of the mantle on from when I started. When I first started, I was like, hey, I've produced things before.

I've made a podcast, a narrative podcast. Before I was a voice actor, I owned a digital media production company. I was like, I know how to bring people together with different talents to put something in. And I was like, I bet I can outsource a lot of this stuff. I can just kind of like helm the ship and like do stuff. And then very quickly found out that, no, I got a, someone has to make the decisions, design the game, be the narrative designer. And one of the big things that I had to learn

because no one else really did and I just kind of took to it was be the story programmer for the entire thing. And it is a massive, massive story. I was the, Inc is the language that we used for it. And we have over 2,000 variables and I designed the whole system

for how it interacts with Unity and then implemented all of the variables that go with it. I built a lot of little fun machines inside Ink that were able to do it. We didn't use it correctly. You're supposed to use ink for, this is what the sorcery games are from, or the 80 days, which is non-voiced. We're using it voiced.

So we weren't able to use some of the full power. They have things called glue. We were able to take parts of text and mush it together. We always had to have voice lines. But it meant that I had to come up with some interesting little ways around that to make voice lines play, take the characters' pronouns, for example, player characters pronouns, play the right thing that happened. And I had a lot of narrative design decisions where we have a lot of randomness in the game or you have characters who give quests in a random way.

And so I built little ways of making those things work inside of the three-dimensional dating sim environment, which was a lot of design problems that I don't think had ever been solved before. Usually you don't see that visual novel dating sim first-person shooter controls all come together. I wasn't expecting that. And the full voice acting. And the full voice acting. This is a real who's who voice actor cast,

which I would say is part of the fun of pointing your aviators. Date vators. Aviators copyrighted. At various objects around the house. It's that you're like, well, who's going to play what? Maddie, I don't know if you've gotten this far, but there's a moment where you're talking to your pal, Sam,

and you're explaining to her what's going on. And you're like, yeah, I got these dateviators. and she's like, no, they're not called deviated. She can't get into it. She calls the magic furniture F-glasses. I don't know if it occurs on the show. So, Ray, I mean, how did you have a programming background? How did you even know where to start for all the aspiring, like, voice actors out there who want to make the...

I am... Yeah, I'm just, you know, there's stuff. I have no formal training in that stuff. I'm just trained. I have a, you know, a theater degree and a minor in film. But a lot of it was... was learning as you went and just saying like, all right, if no one's going to design this narrative, I'm going to design it. If no one's going to do the game design, I'll just do it. But it comes from a

love of, you know, you have a lifetime of playing games that you really like and you say, I want to live up to these ideals. One of my guiding lights with this one was I wanted this game to be Stanley Parable meets Disco Elysium in the sense that light, this is a visual novel that has that has exploration elements with a breezy feel to it, that I could not reach the literary heights of a disco Elysium, but I do like disco Elysium's role-playing, variety, surprises. There's places in it where I do hope that you get emotional and cry and, like, really dig deep into some stuff. And that was kind of my guiding principle for it. And then just, you know, watching Design Doc YouTube tutorial stuff, kind of stuff, listening to you guys, listening to Game Makers Notebook, Game Maker's

Toolkit, these podcasts that really go into how games are made and overcoming challenges, and that kind of stuff really inspired me to keep going forward even when things got dire, because they definitely got dire. When do things get dire? Immediately. We had four years where we were putting together our vertical slice and pitching. And we got a lot of feedback on that. that vertical slice. At first the game was really puzzle oriented. You were locked in the

laundry room. The scandalabra hates that you're dating everything. So you did have to get to room 47. You did have. Yeah. It was really, it was really puzzling. And one of the big pieces of feedback that we had from our art director, Aaron Nijuku Wang, said like, where's the dating part? I want to do the date part. And I'm like, you're right. We're getting too up our own butts about like being avant-garde about this stuff. Too gamey. And so we toned that kind of stuff back down. And then, so that was four years. We got fully funded by Team 17.

And that was such a gift for them to believe in us and to say like, hey, these idiot voice actors have zero percent hit rate on making video games. We're still going to believe in them anyway because they probably can get this done. And then what followed was a series of failure after failure. We had 24 milestones. We failed every single

one. Oh, my gosh. How did that happen? Why it was because it was, and I think one of the reasons why they kept believing in us, because we always failed it for the same reason. The assets were made. We got the writing done. We got the art done. We started building the house.

We had these things done, but they weren't appearing in the build. And that was always just a level of catch-up that we were always playing, which was we have this massive idea for, let's say, I don't want to be too spoiler on this thing. but there's a thing called, say, the postcards, which is, there's like 150 of these images, and they're just not appearing at the correct time, or they're not, the file name was wrong because we're all just trying to get this done as quickly as possible.

And so it was, sorry, you got 89 out of 120 of these things appearing in the build while we're playing it. And so we'd fail the milestone. We'd fail it again and again and again. And it came to a point where I did have to put in my entire life savings into it because it was just like, hey, this either we give full control of the game over to Team 17 to take it over the finish line or I keep the artistic and directorial goals that I wanted and just fund it myself.

So that's what ended up happening in it. And then I took over the roles of all the writing that had to be done left and fixing the bugs. We had 4,222 bugs at the end that were squawed. And I did a round half of it. So needless to say, stakes are a little bit. but high for you for this. Very much. Yes.

But there's always anime conventions. I hope I can make my money back if this game doesn't make anymore. I mean, now I have to write more books. God. Yes. So, yes, is there like a threshold of sales that you have to hit in order to like get yourself back in decent shape? Yeah, so the full final budget was around $3 million for the game.

A large portion of that is the console at a certain. point, I would say like around a third of the budget is just for the console development. And that is something we never, ever could have done without Team 17's help. They have so much of a pedigree, over 25 years of being in business. They know how to make games for console

and put it over. So they had a dedicated team who was taking the game, which was still being worked on, still being added to, even up to the last minute, and then taking that and making sure that there was parity between all the different console versions. And it was frustrating because, you know, you have to design for the switch,

at the time, which was the least available processing power. But you always had to design for that. We wanted to have cool water effects and mirrors and stuff like that. We got some of it in there, but that was always a slight bummer. But I'm really happy because it kept ourselves in check. This game is a maximalist game where it says, if you want to be able to do something, we will absolutely let you do it. There's so much hidden stuff that, like, I don't even think most people really

lies just even from 20 or 30 hours of playing that like there's systems underneath systems underneath these systems that I fully padded out. Yeah. So can you can you elaborate? So people hear the name, date everything and they think of it as a romance sim, but it sounds like you also had a lot of ideas for puzzles and stuff like that. Can you kind of explain a little bit more behind what the game is beyond just talking to hot people? Especially people out there who might not be. It's funny. I just had a conversation with Ben Starr and a couple other voice actors about this last week. because I was like, I'm excited to check out Ray's game, but I am not like personally super into dating sims. And they were like, this is, this is for people who don't like dating

sins awesome. Exactly. So talk to those people. It's like a comedy as well. You're right. It is a visual novel. That is the genre of it, for sure. A visual novel you can walk around. It's the melding of those two walking simulator plus a visual novel. Of course, there are dates in it, but I wanted to sidestepep that right at the outset by saying that the deviators allow you to directly acknowledge a things existence and that is shortens to date everything you are talking to these things it is essentially a big RPG city that you're communicating with it is a balder's gate that you're able to go in everyone has their own shit going on and you're just coming in and uh uh just being a new

player character who's set amidst all these things because of a hundred and that was always from the top it was like we have to have a hundred datable characters because it's ridiculous because whoever would do that. It couldn't, it could not be repetitive. And that was the one thing that I was just driving home every single time. Whenever we chose a character to do, it was they have to have their own lane. It has to be a hundred different lanes that you're in, narratively, visually, sonically. Otherwise, you just get so bored.

So if this was a traditional dating sim where you are going out on a date, you're a high school, or you're going out on traditional dates with all these characters, you would, tap out at 20. It would be the most boring game of all time. So I think pretty quickly I had to go like, this is let's go visual novel territory with a lot of romantic elements. You do get some really saucy dialogue. There is an achievement for having sex with every single character in the game. It allows you to explore all these things or not, and you still get a good thing.

There's Doreen the door who says, I wish everybody would be friends. and he's the friendship path. You also have Reggie Rejection, who's the hate path, and Skyler, who's the love path, and all of those are completely valid options. Just to really clarify here, you said directly acknowledge a thing's existence, and you moved kind of quickly through that.

When it is outlined in the game, you're capitalizing letters there, D-A-T-E, directly acknowledge a thing's existence. Yes. Right off the bat, you're kind of saying, okay, this isn't exactly dating. There is more to it than that, which does seem evident.

from the start. It's cool to hear that there's so much more going on. Yeah, and there's a lot in the game that you haven't even mentioned. I mean, there's a stats system. You unlock certain elements of dialogue, kind of Baldr's Cade or Disco-Eleesian style based on your stats. It is definitely more elaborate than just like talking to hot people and convincing them that you're cool. There's even if you talk to the fireplace, he'll teach you pickup lines. And I'm very curious to see how that system works. The fireplace played by Dante Bosco, named Dante. He, so I wanted variety with all of these characters. Sometimes the specs points are able to, your character points are able to get you cool new dialogue options, but they never block you out of any ending.

And Dante specifically hates those points. And if you try to win him over through use of the points, he's like, man, that's not cool. You're metagaming me, man. I don't like that. So that's the kind of like variety that I really wanted to go where every character is breaking a rule laid out in the system of the game and saying here's a different perspective on what. getting to know someone is, what dating is, what the meta game of this all is. So I'm curious if you had a sense of how deep this was going to be when you set out, because a lot of projects like this, you know, you have a fun idea, this sort of central concept,

and then it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. With a smaller team like you guys had, you can only get so big, I suppose, and that kind of limits you. Because, of course, so many big games, they lose control of it completely. And by the time they ship something, it's this kind of shambolic mess. So I guess did your scope creep and how did you account for that? The scope didn't creep. It took off like a rocket on two separate occasions.

There were two really big ones. And one of them was when we first started out, it was like the only way that we're going to be able to do this is we have a star system with all the dates where some characters are a five-star character. They'll take a whole lot of time, be really deep. We'll have some one-star characters who are little jokey ones that happen. And it was just another offhand comment that changed the entire development. but our senior producer, Jamie Team 17, was playing through the dialogue and Arma, the smoke alarm. Her story was about trauma and dealing with it with her incessant beeping. And then it ended after just like two conversations and she was a one-star character.

And he was just like, it just seems kind of fast. I don't know. It seemed abrupt. Was there more? Is this a bug? I'm not quite sure. Was there more? And I was like, yeah, why?

If this is someone's, this is going to be someone's favorite character, why do any of these need to be abrupt? They should all be five-star characters. Oh, no. Making that decision made everybody amazing. There's a lot of characters. I don't know if you talk to Wall or if you talk to Lux or Aaron the Air, but they can be resolved immediately or Fantina the fan who gives you a love ending immediately. But that's usually just the beginning of their story.

And if you keep going through, you're able to get all of the different endings and find different routes. Sometimes you get a love ending, but it's a toxic love ending. And then you get the real love ending later. So was there ever a point where you're, you kind of regretted adding this stuff? I regretted it every day in my life. Because so again, yeah, we had to do it. We had to figure it out. We had to fund it. And amazingly, we were able to do it. But it certainly took a toll on me personally. I gained 50 pounds making this thing. I could only do it. I still doing conventions in order to pay for the game.

And then doing voice acting as well. Jason, narrating your book happened. One of the hardest weeks of my life was narrating that, the Blizzard book. Let's see something. I'm going to play nice. Because I was also voicing lyric literature. If you want to talk about scope, did you guys talk to lyric or write his book? I talked to him. I talked to him, but just once, not the second time?

No, but I can imagine. If you talk to him second time. He's the spirit of literature. He is. There's going to be some things involved there. He wants to write a book because he's never written. He's only been books. And so he gives you a plot and there's four genres.

There's noir, adventure, comedy, and a romance. erotic and you start a book and it's these four choices and you pick one and at least to four more choice, noir comedy adventure erotic and then four more and then four more until it's 1,024 different stories that you can make with lyric and then he gives it a score. It's like a game within a game. Within a game. Like a choose your own adventure within and choose your own adventure. He gives one a score and then you publish that.

It was hard, man. I was doing lyric. I ended up having to voice lyric just because of the time that was involved around 3,000 lines. And I was like doing that and doing Jason's book the same day, plus working on the bugs. It was a tough, it was a tough time. Yeah, that was a little dramatic. Our publisher, we had some kind of back and forth about whether we'd be able to get you back. We certainly did, yeah.

And it's a hard thing to explain. It's like, Ray's having a tough time because he's making a dating sim. It's like, what? He's busy voicing the spirit of literature right now. And that spirit's writing a lot of books himself. Yes. He's got a lot going on. You said there were two big scope creeps.

What was the other one? So then the other one was, and this I go with Michelle Clio, who is from GDC. I watched a talk from her, and she's a narrative designer. And I was just really inspired by her talk about kindness coins in games. Oh my God, I love that game. You know that. Yeah. You love kindness coins?

Yeah. The one where you get rejected. Oh, sorry, I thought you were referring to like, there's like a game that's about this. Oh, I didn't know that. I'll send it to you after this. It's like a play on how. kindness coins work in games where no matter how many coins, coins so called you give to the one female character in the game, she's a lesbian and she always rejects you.

She knows. That's so good. And I believe the game's called kindness coins. I love this. That reminds me the ending of Disco Elysium with your ex-wife and stuff. I love that. Holy smokes. I would love to play that.

That sounds amazing. I'll send it to you. Kirk here, as I'm editing the episode, two quick things. First of all, that game is kindness coins by Arden Ripley from 2013. We put a link for it down in the show notes. Second thing is Ray is about to mention a plot point from Date Everything that happens a little ways into the game. It's not a huge spoiler. He says it's something that everyone will just be talking about pretty quickly after the game comes out.

But I wanted to at least mention that he is going to give what could be a spoiler for the game. So if you don't want to hear that, skip ahead just a couple of minutes to 29 minutes. and then the conversation will continue with no further spoilers. Okay, back to the show. Bing! Her thing is, yeah, there's kindness coins in RPGs, which are RPGs of Mass Effect can get away with it or a witcher because it's like all you have to do is be nice to them,

and then they'll love you. And that's really not how the real world works. And definitely something I didn't want in this game. We had to come up with other ideas for like how to make these dates seem dynamic and unpredictable, but with hints in the data decks and from other datables and stuff. So she was that, she was inspiring. And then I remember calling her over the course of a couple weeks and saying like, how do we end this game?

How does the through line happen? How is there a central plot to all of it? And we came up with realization, which usually happens about maybe 20 hours into the playthrough. You find out that you can bring these characters to life. They become humans. And then what happens through that thing? The game does not end.

Is this a big spoiler? Are you spoiling some things? At this point, I'm okay with saying, now that the game is out, I think everyone's going to know about it pretty much immediately that like this is how the narrative keeps going. What happens with these date feeders? Now that you're bringing things to life, the more things you bring to life, the more the story progresses. And then you get it, you still get that ending as you leave the house, which changes based on the choices of who you realized and who's out there and how far you got. And that was the second like rocket ship to the moon of like, okay, we have to also write all of these, all of the epilogues for the characters. Now they also have to have a piece of art.

They have to have different poses involved. And we have to keep the lore consistent and not have any overlap between what everyone does with the rest of their lives. So those are the two horrible scope creeps that made everything crazy. But somehow we were able to do it, man. We were not canceled, unbelievably. So it was two of you that had this idea, but I'm curious, and I think listeners might be wondering, how do you think of the size of your team or studio versus, you know, the publisher and the people there who helped you with various things? Like, what's the kind of, what kind of headcount are we talking about?

And how do you think of the various headcounts that interact for this? Yeah, it was, we definitely had leads, which really helped. And all of our leads were just ballers. We had Nijuku, who was our character designer. She designed all of the characters. She sketched out all of the poses. She's great. She's amazing.

Each pose, each character has five different poses that can happen, and then nine different expressions plus blinks for each of the expressions if their eyes are open. And I found out later, because she did not tell me this while she was working on it, because she didn't want to be accused of making herself do crunch. But she did all 13,000 expressions on that game. The other artists would do the poses, and then she would do all of the facial expressions in the blinking and export all the files. and then put them through GitHub, and she's an absolute beast.

And then on the music side, we had Garrett Williamson, who is just incredible at variety, that you're able to give him any kind of reference for these characters, and then he makes it in his own style while incorporating the themes and making it all feel like it's from the same game. And that was something we absolutely needed. Someone who could say, you know, each character has their own theme, someone who can say we need variety

and he got everything. I like Enrique Granados, the Spanish composer and I was like, can you make a Granados song? And he's like, show it to me, never heard of him. And then the next day he wrote Keith the Key song. And it's just like unbelievable

how talented he was. So with Nietzsche at that, we had Garrett as the music part. We had Robbie in the booth directing the actors It was also a superstar. And then I have to give shout out to Suha Al-Samkari, who was a game developer and visual novel

and dating sim designer in her own right, who I was able to catch just the right time and say, hey, our scope went crazy. A lot of our writers have now left the team. Can you help bring this up? And she ended up writing 23 of the characters on her own. We worked really well together where I would just do, I would design the,

the ink for her, put in all the variables, show her how it worked. She would fill it in. I would be the skeleton. She'd be the muscle. And it was such a great working relationship. And she was really good at something that a lot of us writers struggle with with like how to be sexy enough. Where it's not explicit. It doesn't make you feel gross.

But just like that nice titillating quality. And she was a superstar at it. And she wrote all of the narrator lines, which also was a late edition. We did not have a narrator for most of the game. and J.B. Blanc recorded all 5,000 of the lines in the last couple of weeks of development. Yeah. Yeah, the writing is really impressive in this game, and I think people who check it out will come away thinking, wow, this is really strong. I want to ask you, Ray, you're a professional voice actor.

You were now, it sounds like Robbie directed, but I'm sure you were involved as well, because you're so key to the game's development in dealing with these voice actors. What's it like being on the other side of the microphone and having to deal with the quirks of other voice actors? What did you learn from it? It's wild. Yeah, we did a bad thing, which, again, we have no lead characters in our game. Everyone has equal play, which is a very stupid way of making a game. Normally you have lead characters who, like, you bring in, you don't have to explain the game every single time they are.

You don't have to go off to the races and be like, all right, we got to do 800 to 1,200 to 2,000 lines for each of these characters in a four-hour session. It was pretty brutal for a lot of these voice actors to be put under these, the scrutiny. certainly said that it was hard, but they also said it was the most fun that they've had once it was over. They're like, I've never played a character like that. Caste a lot of people against type, and it was, I think it ended up being a good experience for a lot of them. And it's a union game that we are paying our actors residuals for, which is something that we've never experienced in any video game that has ever been made. And we just said, we are going to be the ones to do it. We have a special agreement with SAG.

10% of our profits go to all of our voice actors. That's incredibly cool. That's so cool. Get on you guys for doing that. That's awesome. Be the change you want to see. Well, I'm going to get to the union in a second. But what did you like, were you as someone who's been a voice actor for this long,

working with other voice actors, were you ever like, God, I can't believe I do that? God, this person is doing this. Like, were there any takeaways for you that were like, oh, man, I have to change my style or learn this from the experience? Well, here's what it is. I wasn't there for a lot of the voice acting, unfortunately. We started in March of last year, and it went until around June or so. That was when I was super, super crunched finishing my characters. I wrote 14 myself, and they're usually the most ink-heavy, where there's like really weird.

I just really wanted to flex my programming muscles to be like, what about a character who gives dates randomly? This is Parker, the board games. He gives them randomly, but he weights a die based on how you played his games, and you can cheat or you can win or you can let him lose and all of those end up being the die roll that happens at the end and just making really weird

things like that that took a lot of time or Dory in the door, there's 17 of him in the entire game. Each of the 17 has three of them but three different conversations and then you also... I love how excited you're just about this design complexity. I love it, man.

It was so much fun. There's 17 doors in the house, obviously. There's 17. Let me tell you about the door. Because also you had to make sure that all of the narrative, Dorian's narrative beats like his friend, or not his friend ending, because he gives you that immediately,

but his love and his hate endings, and then his, there's an epilogue with Keith and some other things that happened that had to work with all 17 of the doors at the right time. So you can have, because you can talk to any door at any time, you have to, you sometimes can get his love ending talking to back Dorian where he's facing the wrong way

and speaking muffled into the microphone because he's back Dorian. So anyway, I was doing all of that stuff while recording was happening, so I was only able to attend like 10% of the sessions, which was real tragic. I'm sad that I missed out on that, but it might have been for the good

because Robbie, Amanda Hufford, and Julia, my wife, and Logan Burdick, who were doing the heavy lifting on the voice directing, are a lot nicer than me in the studio. I think I directed Allie Hillis, who was, Maggie the Magnifying Glass, who's a really complex character, and one who I really needed

specific gameplay reads from. And I was so apologetic, but I was like, I know I'm being mean, but it has to be this line. I'm so, so sorry. But I can be, I think my personal directing style is more abrasive than the nicer people who ended up doing it. So I think it might have been a blessing that I wasn't there for a lot of them. It's good. So you mentioned the union. This is Union production. The Union, of course, has been on strike for a long time. It just ended, but it lasted over a year, I believe. Did that impact your production at all? No, because, so this, I was part of both of these strikes were a big part of my career. The first one was the residuals one, where I was working on Final Fantasy 15 at the time,

Project Black. We were spared having to stop recording because we'd already been in production for a year, which was a great, thankfully a great rule. And the casting director and director that Keith Farley was heading up the strike at that first video game strike. So I was intimately involved with that. I did some AMAs with like Jennifer Hale and stuff and it was a big part of it. For the second one, it really was just striking against those 12 companies who, don't quote me on that, something around 12 companies who wouldn't do any sort of AI provisions. But everybody else, all indie studios? just said, yeah, of course we're doing these AI provisions.

We don't want to do this crap. And we were absolutely one of them. When that came out, when SAG was like, this is the new interactive media agreement. We were like, absolutely, we do not want this in our game at all. We have no intention of it. So it was an easy thing. So as far as that strike affecting development, not very much. We had a better contract than most in there.

Yeah, can you talk about how AI is going to impact voice act? I mean, so the strike just ended. It sounds like there's some, certainly not like the, like, certainly not all-encompassing protections against AI. It seems like AI is able to pretty solidly replicate voices these days, which is very scary. How are you and how do you, how are you feeling about it and how do you think it's going to impact your career? I think there's, I think absolutely people who have a bad faith are going to use it and say, who cares, we can make our things worse and people have to buy our stuff anyway. We see that in a lot of technology these days, and I think absolutely bad faith people use it. But I do think that people make things because they like making things. And I don't think

that that's going to really go away anytime soon. It is still difficult to use AI, even if it was something where you were, it was the, if you wanted to make something completely from whole cloth, you still have to tell the AI what to do to make your vision happen. And I don't think it will ever be a thing where like directing an actor is always going to be so much easier than directing an AI. The AI is always going to do the choice that's the safest and easiest choice. And I just don't think it would be very fun to do. Fun and business don't always go together. But I don't think that it's all going to go away.

I really, I truly don't. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about actors licensing their voices to an AI model. Like we saw James Earl Jones in Fortnite coming back to play. play Darth Vader. This seems like something that more people will do, or especially if the financial incentives line up right? I could imagine someone entertaining the idea, oh, okay, you just pay a recurring license to subscribe to my voice plug-in in Pro Tools or whatever, and then you can just have me say anything. I can totally imagine some people doing that. I'm curious what you as an artist think of that. I think that you can absolutely do that,

but I think it's kind of a toy that will lose its charm pretty quickly. You can talk to James Earl Jones, but he's also not going to be very interesting. I don't think people are going to still be asking him questions in Fortnite a year from now and going like, I got him to say this. It's kind of just like making a crank call or something.

And it's fun for sure. But I think it loses its luster after a while and feels empty. And I do believe that humans really don't like feeling empty for very long. I can see it a lot with the younger generation being like, I just don't feel good. It doesn't make me feel good. My phone doesn't make me feel good.

And I can see it going the other way in the future for sure. But I also think we're going to have a deluge of Terrible Games by EA for a while. That's not going anywhere. Terrible Games by EA or Terrible Games by AI or both? EAA, yes, absolutely. I'll plug this article, Why AI isn't going to make art by Ted Chang. in the New Yorker. That was one that really

put my mind, I think, in the place that makes sense about how difficult it is to make AI entertaining and good. It's true. It's true. It's more of a nuisance than anything else. So, Ray, I want to talk a little bit about voice acting in general. You've been doing this for a long

time now, sitting in a room by yourself with your thoughts and reading lines and trying to get the emotion out of them. We've also seen some kind of interesting evolutions in voice acting and performance capture specifically. A lot of people now are just kind of like using their faces and their voices. They're doing all sorts of motion capture on set. Can you talk a little bit about how the profession of voice

actor has changed over the years and kind of what the current state of things and the future of being a voice actor looks like? Hmm. Hmm. What do you think about your entire career? About my entire career. It's going that good, eh? I'm trying to come up with a, yeah, I'm trying to come up with an answer about, like, how it's changed. Maybe it hasn't. I mean, I guess, well, one thing is that you can record so effectively from home. It seems to me that more and more games just are able to have fully voiced, you know, a fully voice performances,

partly because it's less expensive. You don't have to necessarily rent studio time and have a director if someone's just directing the game themselves or having their friends come in. It seems like there is just more voice acting. than ever. You're right. Okay, I think that is a good angle. Yes, over, over COVID, we all had to record at home. So it did open up the, the ability for a lot of people who didn't live in Los Angeles and Dallas, Texas, to be able to record some lines. We got some really cool talent from far-flung places who joined the ranks of working professional voice actors, which was cool. But things have definitely opened up. We're back in the studio a whole lot. And, uh, um, there, but there is that, I was there on both sides of it. When I first started my career pre-COVID, there was this sense of fun, like in the lobbies and stuff. You'd see people, everyone's coming in at the same time. There'd be a receptionist. There was sort of a nice club atmosphere that came in it. We're all people who are very much

struggling to get booked. Let's all be nice to the other people who are in the exact same position that all of us are. And that after COVID kind of went away. It is a lot more. There's not a lot of receptionists. There's not a lot of lobbies. You're going into a place, even though you're in studio. You're still very much cut off from a lot of your other voice actor friends. We threw a party, a cast party a couple of nights ago for everyone. A few hundred people showed up.

And one of the things that I heard a lot was it's been a long time since I've gone to a cast party. Film and TV don't have those. Video games don't have them anymore. It's definitely a thing of the past. And that sort of sense of fun has gone away. That is really sad. Yeah, it's definitely sad. But sassy chap games will continue to have cool cast parties.

Yeah, you can keep the gas parties a lot. Do you ever get a chance to play with other people and read your lines with other people, or is it entirely just you in a room alone for these gigs? I have an unusual path for voice acting. I did audiobooks. I do promo. I do commercial, and I do video games, and almost no animation. I recently got X-Men, Devil May Cry, a copy.

couple of these sorts of things, but I was a really slow burn for my animation career. And that is where you get to work with people. With video games, you're always completely alone. Final Fantasy, we tried one session where we were like in the same room, but because you're dubbing and you have to get the lines exactly correct to the Japanese time code, there's just no sense of play. It doesn't help to have the other person in the room when you have to get it right, right, exactly the correct timing. So I personally have to... have met very, very few of the voice actors coming up, just because I recorded it alone so, so much. But definitely some people in my cohort were able to work together. You might see it in the younger

generation two where they're able to have YouTuber v-tuber careers that get started. And I feel like those people do have a little bit of a closer relationship because they're able to collab and work together in a way that I just missed out on. It's incredible that for Final Fantasy 15, you guys were able to build such a camaraderie among the four. for main cast members in the game without ever actually playing together. The wild thing was is that all the credit goes to Keith Farley and Dan Inouye, who were the lead localizer and the lead director, they listened back to the conversations.

And we did pickups if the conversation didn't feel natural. And that was like, that's a true testament to the luxury of working with the AAA and a really great company like Square Annex, who are like, let's put that extra bit of effort to go back and re-record something. We don't check it off the checklist until it's actually done. And I really commend them for doing that.

It was so, so important. You mentioned the newer generation of voice actors often coming from YouTubeing, somewhere where they have their own platform. We had Matt Mercer on the show last season to do this Triple Quest thing. And it was kind of my first interaction with someone from Critical Role.

But Critical Role is really impressive in that it's a bunch of voice actors who then became creators and then made their own very successful company. Now you're doing something kind of similar where you're making something that is outside of voice acting. Do you think that that is maybe the smartest path or at least a good path for a voice actor to, instead of just acting and acting and acting in other people's projects, to make something yourself just from a financial perspective and a sort of career perspective? Absolutely. You guys are artists as well, making your own stuff.

And there is something about owning your own IP, being your own boss where you're like not auditioning or asking for work all. the time. I'm always asking for work every day auditioning for stuff. And it's, it's definitely, I think that a lot of actors see the writing on the wall. We're like, well, I can't do that forever. And I can't have my retirement just be like to the whims of casting directors and what's, what's the new cool thing and what do games sound like? And who knows? Maybe there's a new media that comes out, a new way of acting that like we never even thought about. Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people do that. But I think it only works if you're not doing it just for the commerce of it all, if there's a real genuine passion. And I think Matt and friends, it's like you can

see how genuinely passionate they are about us. And I hope you see it with Sassy Chap that like a real thing does not come off as a cynical money. As a cash grab. Yeah, you seem very passionate, which actually makes me wonder, do you feel like being a game designer and programmer is your dream now? I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was it was awful. And I can't wait to do it. again. That was going to be my real question. Are you going to make another game now, even after everything you told us today? Yeah.

I think what I really liked doing, if there's a next game, if we're able to make my money back, if it doesn't all go away, I think what I really liked about date everything was that there isn't anything like it. And there were a lot of design problems that I got to solve. I don't think I'd ever be able to make a game, like my favorite games, like Slade the Spire. Megacrit's always going to make a better version of it. And I would always just be trying to catch up to them. I love people like Lucas Pope, Jonathan Blow.

The Witness is an incredible game. It's just its own thing. It's trying to be coherent in design and solving new problems. And that to me is what's most fun about game development. I want to keep doing. I don't think I'll be able to make a doom or something like that. It has to be something weird. We're all very excited.

One last question before we have to go, Ray. So you did Final Fantasy 15. Ben Starr did Final Fantasy 16. Is Ben Starr better than you? Is he replaced you? Because his game is one more than yours. It is one more. Yeah, there's another digit there, yeah.

He's also won more than I have. He certainly has a lot more awards than I ever could dream up. You're the underdog here. And God dang it, he is a sexy beast himself. I don't think I can compete against Ben Starr, unfortunately. But you did make a video game and he did not. Yeah. That's true.

You've got this one on him. Not yet. Not yes. Your turn. Has been thrown Ben Starr. I think Ben's passion for video games might just lead him down the exact same path. And I cannot wait to see what he makes. He just announced a game.

I'm seeing Ben Starr announces date even more things. You date 200 things. Oh, my God. I love it. All right. Date everything. It is out right now. Ray, sell everybody on it in two sentences.

Two sentences with semicolins maybe. Date everything. There's more under the hood. than you can imagine. Please consider buying the deluxe edition. It's $5 more. And you get two extra characters, the whole OST, which is five hours long,

the art book, and you get to wear a fantastic red shirt that opens up new dialogue possibilities that don't do anything. Exciting. All right. You definitely sold it. All right, Ray,

thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. The three normal hosts. We'll be taking a break and we'll be back for one more thing. And we'll say goodbye. Bye to you now. Farewell, Ray. Thank you for being here. Bye, guys. Hi, everybody. It's Ellen Weatherford. And Christian Weatherford.

People say not to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. But we can judge a snake by its ability to fly, or a spider by its ability to dive. Or a dung beetle by its ability to navigate with the starlight of the Milky Way galaxy. On just the zoo of us, we rate our favorite animals out of ten in the categories of physical effectiveness, behavioral ingenuity, and of course, aesthetics. Guest experts like biologists, ecologists, musicians, comedians, and more join us to share their unique insights into the animal kingdom. Listen with the whole family on maximum fun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

The wizards answer eight by eight. The cornclaves call to demonstrate their arcane gift, their single spell. They number 64. Until a conflagration. 63 and 62 they soon shall be. As one by one the wizards die till one remains to rain on high. Join us for Taz Royale,

an oops-all wizard's battle royale season of the Adventure Zone every other Thursday on maximum fun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. Big thanks to Ray Chase for coming on the show. Make sure you check out his game, date everything. We're all playing it and laughing very hard. It's funny. It is funny.

All right. It's time for one more thing. Maddie, you've got some wild, exciting news. So why don't you start us off? My news is that I quit my job at Polygon. And I just kind of felt like it was time for a change. Well, really, Vox Media felt like it was time for a change. That's true. Jim Bankoff personally felt like it was a time for a change for Polygon. And then I also felt like it was a time for a change for me, Maddie Myers. Stuck it out for a month. And honestly, just ended up feeling like my heart wasn't in it. I was really attached to the polygon of the before times. Still am, quite frankly. Probably need a lot more time to grieve what it was. And I think we all can relate to that. I mean, we all had our moment of quitting Kotaku.

around the same time, feeling like it was really different when Jim Spanfeller took over. The deadspin walkout happened. I was so angry by that that I was like, I'm finding a new job right away. And then I will say, after us, a lot of other people worked to Kataku. A lot of them really great writers, really enjoyed reading them. And that's fine. That's fine with me. And I think something like that will probably happen at Polygon.

I'm really curious to see who's going to work there now. And truly, no hard feelings to anybody who wants to take that. job. I think sometimes people who are like fans of a site kind of have mixed feelings about somebody else coming on. I just, I just want to say, I don't think that's fair. A job is a job. If you want to, if you want to feel however you want to feel, that's fine. But like, no hard feelings on my end towards the polygon of the future. It's really just that I left because I am attached to the polygon that was. It's worth, it's worth noting that like when Deadspin imploded all the staff quit kind of in solidarity.

People joined at that point were fucking scabs. Like any of the new deadspin people, those are fucking assholes. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying, I'm saying this to draw a contrast between that and Polygon. Polygon is not a struck workplace. Polygon is not a place where all of the staff have quit in solidarity. It is a place where

actually like a lot of and I think a lot of them, despite their bitterness would be supportive of like people trying to make Polygon great and keep it great. It is a very different circumstance. this is not a case where like people should feel inclined to be angry of people who stay and work there in the future. I really hope they don't. And that's mainly what I want to leave this on is I don't begrudge anybody who has kind of the emotional fortitude to stay. And in some ways,

I wish I did and I tried for a few weeks there. And I just felt ultimately really sad and very deeply attached to the polygon that used to be. And that means I can't remake it in this time. It's more psychological than anything else for me. So that's where I'm at, but it means that I'm freelancing again for the time being, because I quit with nothing lined up, at least for now. But you never know. Who's to say what will happen in the future? I guess I'll leave it there.

It's nice having Triple Click is our kind of stable, weekly thing that we own and can never be taken away. That's true. Maximumfront.com. Go on. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it always speaks. All the experiences the three of us have had in media. Just speak to the importance of owning your own thing and how cool and amazing that is.

And that has been something I've really treasured in just the past month is thinking about the fact that we own triple click. It's ours. Nobody can sell triple click and lay off two of us, which is, that sounds perhaps comical for me to even say. But that is literally how it's felt to me at work lately would be the equivalent of. someone selling triple click and just randomly dartboard laying off two of us and telling the third, hey, you need to hire two more co-hosts. Like, wouldn't that make you feel freaking nuts? So, uh, my main thought, Maddie, is that your work at Polygon was usually behind the scenes or a lot of the work that you did as an editor was behind the scenes. And I think that will be missed in

ways that people might not even realize. Since you write really well, of course, obviously, and I like reading your articles, but so much of what you were doing, doing there was editing other people's work. And I think so many writers have that relationship with you, that you kind of helped them get some article into shape, you know, take some idea that just wasn't working and make it work. And that relationship is really precious. I mean, from every editor that I've ever worked with, you know, I just think of the articles that would have been terrible and that wound up being good, that then had my name on them and I got all the credit, even though it was an editor that made it what it was. And you did that for a lot of people.

And so I guess part of this is just to say you're cool and you're good at your job and I respect that about you. But also that this is something that I think Polygon is losing and also has lost in many of the other people who were laid off in the transition. I agree. While people might notice bigger names, people who wrote a lot or wrote reviews or really high profile articles, you know, people, it takes a lot of people to make a website run and that they will be poorer for not having you. and you will make any place that you go after this much richer as a result. I hope so. Thanks. Not just editing also. And Maddie, this is the blow smoke up your ass section.

Maddie, not just editing. But I think, like, in my experience working with you, your best quality is also mediating and working with people and managing people and, like, mediating conflicts and, like, getting people to work together really well. So if anyone listening out there is like, hmm, I need someone like that. Maddie Myers is your gal. because you're really good. Yeah, well, that's a lot of invisible work that keeps like any sort of team running is like having someone who's really good at just like recognizing, oh man, this is like a simmering, this is a tension point, this is a simmering conflict, I need to step in and help out with that and make sure these people can kind of like work together more smoothly and see eye and I.

And you're always really good at just kind of threading the needle and like negotiating those conflicts and helping people work together better, which I think help made control. Taku run really well back when it was when we were there. Wow. I didn't know you guys were going to be so nice. And now I don't know what to say. Thank you. You're good, Maddie, and we like you. Yeah, now we should move on before you burst into tears.

I mean, I don't know. I'll try not to just tell a stupid joke. But it's true. Kirk and Jason are just at each other's throats when we're not recording. And it's all I can do to keep them from fighting every day. We need the moderator. We're still arguing about Game of Thrones and Maddie just manages to keep us working together. Yeah.

All right. Let's go to Kirk. What's your one more thing, Kirk? My one more thing is a book that I've been reading on the recommendation of my friend Ryan called The Air Affair. And you may hear that and think Air A-I-R, but oh no, it is Air E-Y-R-E, as in Jane Eyre, the incredibly famous English novel. And this is a really interesting book that I'd never heard of. It is by an author named Jasper Ford. It was published in 2001.

It stars a woman named Thursday Next and is the first in a series called The Thursday Next Novels. It's, I would say, intended for a maybe slightly younger audience, though it's kind of unclear who it's intended for, and that makes it very entertaining and interesting. This is an alternate timeline story. It's very English. It is extremely nerdy. It is written by a massive English literature nerd. and if you are at all a fan of Jane Eyre or the broader pantheon of English literary works, you will probably enjoy this book, though if that's you, you've probably also read this book or at least are aware of it.

So the premise of this book is that it is 1985 in England. Thursday next is a literary detective working for a government branch. I think they're called spec ops, which is a little confusing, since these days we think of spec ops as like, you know, Seal Team 6 or whatever. but there are all these branches of spec ops in the English government, and they are very much not SWAT teams. They're very weird detectives with incredibly abstract and strange specialties. And this is an alternate history where not only is history very different, but also technology is completely different. There's all kinds of strange technological developments. A bunch of previously extinct species have been brought back because of gene splicing.

there are just like time travel is possible and it's never fully explained why literature has become kind of a central flashpoint for all of culture. Like some of the broadest cultural conflicts are over, for example, who was really Shakespeare? And it's not just like a thing that nerds argue about at universities. It's like a massive thing that everyone has a huge opinion about and there are protests in the streets about it. And then in the world, Wales has broken off from England and is now a socialist repuls. So there's a hard border at the Welsh border.

And England has been at war with Russia for more than 100 years over Crimea, which is a very weird thing. I mean, it makes sense because Crimea has been like sort of war-torn and contested for longer than it is right now in the current invasion of Ukraine. But if you're reading it, it's like it's a really central part of the world building. Thursday next is actually a war veteran who fought in the Crimea, as they call it, and lost her brother. there and there's like it is constantly referenced this ongoing war against Russia in the Crimea. It's like a really central part of the back story of the world. So describing all of that, you might be thinking, okay, wait a minute, what? You said something about being a literary nerd. The thing is this book is actually a comedy. It feels like Douglas Adams. I mean, that's kind of my

touch point for it. It's really wild and weird. There's all kinds of interesting technology, very funny names, weird little tricks with the writing, a lot of cleverness, being thrown at you at any given moment, and it's very disorienting, and you just kind of go with it. And the story is basically that Thursday Next is hot on the trail of this incredibly villainous, like basically a super villain who is, he's almost just pure chaotic evil. He just loves doing evil stuff. And he begins infiltrating famous novels and kidnapping and or killing the protagonists or characters of those novels, which then causes the novel itself to change.

And then because literature is this much bigger cultural, force in this world. It's like a huge deal. Like when Jane Eyre is imperiled, which happens in this, of course, it's called the air affair. And Jane Eyre plays an important role. When that happens, it isn't just like, like what would happen right now if in America somehow Jane Eyre was kidnapped out of her book and then the book changed. Like, people would think that was really weird, but it wouldn't be like a cataclysmic cultural collapse. And it is in this story because Jane Eyre is like such an important thing to everybody. So it's almost impossible for me to describe it further. I mean, there's a million little rabbit holes, but it's just like a really charming and it's a really charming and unusual book. It's not like

anything I've really ever read. It's it just moves from genre to genre and style to style so quickly. It just seems so specific. Apparently Ford was rejected like dozens of times before he finally found someone to publish it and now has found, I mean, I think the books are well thought of and he wrote a whole series and has continued to write. So it's really neat. I mean, I recommend it, if only as a literary curiosity, but also it's a very entertaining and funny book. I've really enjoyed it. So that is my recommendation for The Air Affair by Jasper Ford, the first of the Thursday next books. And I will certainly be reading the rest of this series. Cool. That sounds awesome. I will check it out. You sold me.

My one more thing is also a book. It's a book called Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Harowitz. Anthony Harwitz is like one of the most prolific and talented mystery writers on the planet. He's a British author who has also written a ton of other incredible series and books. I think he's best known for Alex Ryder. He's also done like some Sherlock Holmes books and a ton of other books. I've talked about, I think one of these other books is why one more thing too. This is the third in a series about a detective slash book publisher named Susan Rylund. The first books were Magpie murders and Moonflower Murders.

This is the most recent one. It just came out. And the gimmick of these books is that they're set in this world where there's a book series called Atticus Pooned that is about this world's version of Sherlock Holmes. And each of these books, the actual books, so in this case Marble Hall, Murders, murders, has a book within the book. And so that book within the book is kind of key to solving the mystery that actually happens in the book. So Marble Hall Murders has this big mystery involving a rich family and they're kind of like the truth behind some various kind of murders or deaths. And within the book is an entire Atticus Poon novel that you read as you're going

through the book, like suddenly the font will change and you'll be inside this other book. And that has its own mystery involved, and that mystery is linked to the grander mystery in some way or another. And it is phenomenal. It is a tremendous accomplishment, just like the first two were. All of these series, this entire series, all three books are incredible. This latest one is just as good as the other two. And, yeah, I don't even want to say more other than the main character, Susan Riland, is just a great character because she's, like, so stubborn to the point where you're just like, why are you doing this season? Oh my god, you were making such bad decisions.

But she's actually so very likable because of the stubbornness and because of her kind of willingness to make the right decision or what she thinks is the right decision even when it's probably also the stupid decision. And I'll just kind of leave a vague at that. One thing I'll also say, if you are interested in these books, you should not start with this one because this one has a very direct link to the first book in the series and very clearly spells out who, who the murderer is in the first book in the series. So if you're going to check these out, go check out Magpie murders first,

then Moonflower murders, then the most recent one, Marble Hall murders. And they're all incredible. And then Atticus Putin, when you're reading those books, it's just so delightful because Atticus Putin is this classic Sherlock Holmes character

who, like, deduces things immediately, and you are just like, as the reader, you're one step behind him the entire time and just trying to keep up with him, and it's all just delightfully entertaining. And Anthony Horowitz is just somehow, like, finds a balance between the two books and gets you to remember characters from each of them without, like, totally losing track, which is such a skill. I'm sure, like, you definitely kind of like have to, your mind has to get used to like, oh, am I in this book or am I that book every once in a while. But, like, for the most part, it's all very clear and understandable, even though it is literally two books in one.

and he is brilliant at executing it and finding a right balance between reminding you who people are without losing any of the steam of the narrative. So yeah, I strongly recommend this one. I really, I strongly recommend starting with the beginning as much as that might seem like homework. But Magpie murders is really good. And if you start with this one, you'll just kind of be spoiling the ending for yourself of the first book. So you should check on the first book. Nice. These sound great.

Yeah, this is like the most meta series of recommendations in a triple-click episode ever with like date everything the air affair and Marble Hall murders. Like we're really on theme here. Yeah. How many books within books, books, within books, within games, within books. God, for real. What is this? What are we doing? But yeah, Anthony Harwitz, he's so friggin prolific and so good. Like everything I've read by him is just delightful.

So, yeah, he's a, he's a superstar. He's a treasure. I think he's written like dozens and dozens. the books. He's kind of like the... Some of those people just have that. Some people have the gift. Yeah. The Stephen King of the mystery business. See, if I did that, then Ray Chase wouldn't have to worry about money. I know. Get it together. Jason. You should employ him for her. God, if only. Think of the voice. If only. All right, that is that for this week's episode. Thanks again to Ray for coming on. That was a lot of fun hanging out with him. And we're all excited to play more of date everything.

Maddie, good luck in the job hunt. Yeah, I'll figure it out. Don't worry about me. We're not worried. We're not worried. You'll be fine. And in the meantime, yeah, I'll see you both next week. See you next time.

Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the MOYEGYEGY. Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us

by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at Triple ClickPocpods, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.