#developer commentary

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“Do you want to stay down here or something?”

“For being the individual responsible for educating Shadow on ‘the power of friendship’, it seems you do not trust your friends.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I have activated my emergency transponder. Help is on the way.”

“How do we know the signal’s gotten through all this concrete? Have you got a response from anyone?”

“Negative. There has been no response.”

“Then we could be stuck down here until we do something! Come on, work with me here, dude!”

“Did you inform anyone as to the location of your mission before you arrived here?”

“Did you?”

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Omega speaks very formally, with long sentences and complete phrasing. Sonic, meanwhile, uses shorter, choppier phrases, sometimes with interjections or other slang words. Omega also doesn't use contractions whereas Sonic does. Even with the removal of Omega's speech quirk of using all caps, it's fairly obvious who's saying what in the dialogue above, even though I tried my damndest to pick dialogue that didn't have other context cues as to who was saying what.

Other characters have different speech quirks. Silver is rambly and has trouble communicating exactly what he means, Rouge uses a TON of cliché phrases and likes punctuating with pet names, and Shadow is actually my most "neutral" character voice, as he speaks evenly, plainly, and with just a slight tinge of formality.

I create these speech patterns for every character that I write with based on observations from canon game lines, but also a heavy dose of fanon from other fics that I read. So really, I guess this answer isn't so different from the one I gave regarding the voices I hear in my head- it's sort of a blend of everything, with a healthy dose of my own fine-tuning to even it out.

A small introduction first. Nice to meet you, I’m Salli Loikkanen, better known as Aviala online. I study game design at university level, but I’m doing a special modified “program” that lets me gain study credits from working in my field. I have a few gamejam titles under my name, and I’ve been involved in a few commercial game projects before (though none of them have been released as of yet). I’m an artist and a designer, but most importantly, the project lead, producer and project manager for Your Royal Gayness.

I started working on Your Royal Gayness in Summer 2016. I was really excited - a game about a gay prince who needs to come up with excuses to avoid marrying a princess! What a great idea!

It was supposed to be a very small game jam project, and I was gonna get an artist friend to help me out a bit, but mostly, I was going to do everything myself - coding, art, writing, design, everything. I’m not quite sure where the summer went and what exactly I was doing, but needless to say that I didn’t get very far with the game - just a half-finished game design document and a few sketches.

However, when autumn came and I needed to start working on a game for a school course, the project popped back into my mind. I pitched the project to some second-year students since my classmates had their own ideas, and managed to gather a team of 6 people (we’ve gained a few more along the way after that!). I tried to give each person a role they’d be happy with, and apparently it was a success, since no-one’s complained! :’) The way we work is that we try to have a meeting each week and discuss our progress, and what needs to be done next. It’s incredebly useful to be able to meet up IRL instead of just online, and I recommend it to everyone who can manage to gather their indie team in one place.

Work has been somewhat slow so far since everyone has been studying and only working on the game on their free time, but we’ve also got a lot of work done. You should see our google drive - it’s full of documents and files and folders and subfolders, worth hundreds of hours of hard work. Too bad it’s all confidental!