They say that you never find love if you’re looking for it, but maybe you just haven’t been looking in the right places. Date Everything!, the debut title from Sassy Chap Games, is a dating sim that offers 100 potential romance options, and the reveal trailer’s catchy theme song saying, “everything leads to love” is more truthful than you might think. In Date Everything!, prepare for a fresh take on the dating sim genre as you fall in love with anthropomorphized versions of your favorite household objects. Yes, you read that right. Stay with me.
The minds behind Sassy Chap Games – veteran voice actors Ray Chase (Jujutsu Kaisen, Final Fantasy 15, X-Men ‘97), Robbie Daymond (Sailor Moon, Jujutsu Kaisen, Persona 5), and Max Mittelman (One-Punch Man, Persona 5, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth) - are no strangers to being in games, but Date Everything! is their first venture in making one. “We had certain skill sets coming into this, but there’s so much we learned about how to produce a video game,” Chase told me on a phone call between him, Daymond, and myself. “Yeah, we started as voice actors, but we gained so many other hats along the way that we didn’t think we’d have to learn to wear.”
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How Did Date Everything! Come To Be?
The trio have worked together throughout the years on assorted games, anime, and programming as their group L.A.V.A – Loud, Annoying, and Very Annoying – so it was nothing out of the ordinary when Daymond cracked a joke about the game’s premise back in 2016. “It was just kind of a casual conversation, we were joking around in the booth,” Chase said. “Then I came to him the next day and said, ‘I think we should make this thing.’”
After working on the project in silence since then, Sassy Chap Games finally unveiled the trailer for Date Everything! at Galaxycon in Raleigh, North Carolina and worldwide online on July 25, 2024. Unable to get the song out of my mind after friends sent the trailer my way, I reached out to Sassy Chap Games to ask a little more about such a hilarious project.
Date Everything! is an ambitious dating sim that features 70,000 fully voice acted lines, 11,000 hand-drawn images, and more than four hours of music from two-time Grammy winner Adam Berry. More than 70 voice actors came together to contribute to the 100 total characters for the game, with Chase highlighting an early fear that so many characters could potentially feel repetitive. “That was 100 percent one of the problems we needed to solve,” he explained. “I can confidently say that, of our 100 characters, there is zero overlap between them.”
“We made the decision that we wanted almost every character to have a unique voice actor, and thankfully, that is our primary job,” laughed Daymond as he touched on how the group approached casting a project of this size. “A lot of casting was just sending out texts and making phone calls to say, ‘Please, please, will you please come play a desk lamp?’”
But it wasn’t just the friends they made along the way that came aboard. “We also had to cast a wide net for some of our characters that have a specific background or specific lore written in,” Daymond explained. “We contact(ed) agents in the remote Pacific Islands, we have a Newfoundlander, and we’ve got some amazing new talent that really knocked our socks off.”
I asked if they had characters in mind when they asked their fellow voice actors to participate. “When you’re writing for a game, you have people’s voices in mind, you have your pipe dreams of who things are,” Chase said. Daymond elaborated, “Some people, it was a slam dunk out of the gate, and other roles were really a puzzle, but I think we got there. In fact, I know we got there.”
But the actors cast did have some say in how these characters ended up, as well. “Some of them, we rewrote the characters because their performance was so good,” Chase said. “We can talk about Keyes, who wasn’t written as Nigerian, but Joy Ofodu came in with a read that was just like, ‘Oh, that’s it, that’s the character!’”
“A lot of casting was just sending out texts and making phone calls to say, ‘Please, please, will you please come play a desk lamp?’” - Robbie Daymond
After seeing a handful of the fun characters in the trailer, I asked which of the 100 dateable characters the pair were looking most forward to dating in the game. Daymond’s pick is yet to be revealed (though he emphasized how “unhinged” they’ll be), but Chase was quick to highlight Dorian the Door, voiced by Final Fantasy 16 actor Ben Starr. The studio will be revealing a handful of characters periodically until the game launches, with Dorian being the first outside the trailer.
“He’s (a) tutorial character and there are 17 of him in the house. They all have different conversations and he’s just funny, to me, in the way that he doesn’t really want to participate,” Chase replied. “He’s there for you, he wants to be friends and nothing more, and the puzzle is, how do you get him to fall in love with you?”
The Long Road From Date Everything!’s Design To Debut
The Sassy Chaps know the premise for Date Everything! is pretty goofy, but their goal was to make the silly set of characters feel as real and fleshed-out as humanoid furniture can possibly be. Since 2022, Date Everything! has been made with Team 17, the publisher behind Overcooked and countless other games, and working with a team who knew what they were doing was of great importance.
“With Team 17, this is our first game, so we really wanted somebody that specialized in indie games,” Daymond emphasized, “that had history and experience in working with devs like us, who had the pedigree and patience to deal with us.”
Other than keeping the secret among dozens of people, with about 70 total voice actors in addition to the folks at Team 17, the biggest problem Sassy Chap Games faced in getting the project off the ground was the Covid-19 pandemic changing how things were done behind the scenes in the entertainment industry.
“We kind of got kneecapped by Covid a little bit, as far as pitching in person and people were sort of questioning the nature of investing in entertainment in general,” Daymond said.
But given the secretive nature of the project until its public reveal so many years after conception, they also said that one of the group’s other biggest hurdles in developing the game was not having outside feedback along the way. “It’s such a scary thing, to work on something in silence for six years, and then two years, and wonder if it’s a good idea,” Daymond said.
Despite being nervous for the reveal, they’re glad people seemed to “get it” when the trailer dropped. Daymond said, “We just put it out there in such a major way… and for it to be so overwhelmingly, everybody gets it, that they realize it’s a ridiculous concept executed at a super-high level, I cannot wait to deliver for those people and subvert the expectations of the doubters.”
“We treated all these characters as real people, and there are eight billion of them in the world that you could go meet, share your life with, and have an adventure with,” he summarized. “We figured out how to do 100.”
Date Everything! doesn’t currently have a release date, but stay tuned to Sassy Chap Games’ announcements in the coming weeks for more info about the game.
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