making dialtown paratext more easily accessible

Tiny inclusion, but Roger's neighbour in the bad route is actually Latino! It's a little hard to tell because of the scene lighting + the character never getting a name, but I can confirm the stock model + character both are!

please give us more information about Omair, i love them so much and i want to know more about them!!!!

Fun fact, Omair is the only Muslim NPC in DT... that I can recall off the top of my head. He doesn't explicitly mention this in his dialogue, but there's a few clues, his name + his shop's rules, which are atypical for Dialtown, like not mentioning Satan's name in his shop and of course - no cursing. It's a nice little detail that separates him from the ordinarily foul-mouthed town.

His full name is Omair Al-Haddad, which is, like most DT names, a pun. Omair is frequently translated as 'problem-solver' and Haddad being 'blacksmith'. So y'know, 'Problem-solving blacksmith' pretty much sums up a talented IT guy. Fabron's surname also comes from the same place.

As for where his traits came from, I wanted another shopkeeper NPC for the game, but specifically, I liked the idea of having an honest or friendly one that was overly patient/fair with Roger/Gingi and winds up paying the price for it. I do like to imagine that after the route ends, he (eventually) gets paid back though.

Usually with a lot of my NPCs, I like to have them clearly striding for something? Like everyone in the world, Omair moves even when he's not around. He loves what he does and cares a lot for his business, but his shop is in an awful location with little foot traffic and due to his lack of revenue, he could not set up anywhere else if he wanted to. As a result, he runs TV commercials at like 3 or 4am in the morning - not once has anyone ever been swayed by them.

With Omair's design, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted him to look like at first. I went back and forth on the head, but decided to stick with the Phone head since Fabron, the other IT guy of the route, already had a custom and swapping them wouldn't have made sense, since I was using Fabron's screen for the possession screen.

The idea of having Omair be a Muslim was pretty much the last thing I came up with for the character. It actually stemmed from me from struggling to land on a name for him. I basically looked through names that had certain meanings, y'know, relating to intelligence, problem solving, working with metal and... 'Omair' was by far the one I liked best. Then I realized that I didn't actually have any other NPCs in the game who were clearly Muslim.

Then I thought more about it and realized how relatively uncommon black Muslims are in fiction for the most part, despite being a fairly common demographic, though perhaps less so in the States. For context, my next door neighbours while working on DT were Nigerian Muslims and I always enjoyed stopping to chat to them. Probably the closest I've been to neighbours since moving out, so they left an impact on me to say the least.

African American Muslims were also hugely important in American 1960's cultural politics, with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X's activism, and there's a few smaller references to the politics of that decade in the DLC due to Crown's influence on the story, like Benny's introduction. Benny's surname, Fusco, partly comes from the photographer who shot Robert Kennedy Sr's funeral train! I'm rambling, but yeah, I decided to go with it.

There WAS a cut idea for a Norm + Roger conversation in Chapter 3 of Norm's route, if you finished Roger's route first.

I'm actually really pleased to see someone point all this out. I've seen tons of people compare Henry to Crown and kinda bashed my head against a wall thinking "Oh my GOD, there's so many more similarities between Crown and DAVE, it's so obvious!" There's even a few important ones you didn't mention that are probably more obvious to me since I have more info about what Crown was like.

But, no, it wasn't really intentional. Honestly, I only noticed those similarities when I mapped the whole timeline + each of the dynamics out and began discussing the characters more deeply with collaborators. I pulled inspiration from some of the same/similar sources (there's some Gatsbyian qualities in Crown too, for instance), so some traits/individual dynamics wound up being similar. Or maybe I'm just being haunted by something.

A core theme of Randy's route is that he's in a prison that has real walls, but the bars are pretty much rubber and he simply assumes he can't get out on his own without someone opening his cell's door.

The bandage is just one of MANY things that Randy is insecure about. Hell, it's just as valid to ask why Randy doesn't wear gloves... or hell, a mask. Randy's concerns with the bandage's text mainly revolved around not wanting to get fired from his last job, which did come to pass. It's also not a coincidence that Gingi was the one who came up with the idea.

Assuming I could get anyone? My opinions change for this constantly, so I'll just mention the ones that come to mind.

Gingi - Steve Buscemi. (i've never been able to land on a voice for Gingi that's exactly what I'm picturing but Buscemi would kill as Gingi)

Karen - Rhea Seahorn (phenomenal actor + I think her cadence for Kim Wexler would work for Karen.)

Mingus - I have no earthly idea. Edie Falco would be a fun unconventional choice. She'd sell any scene where Mingus freaks out well, I think. Wendie Malick would also do it well. But, I feel there's someone 'perfect' I haven't considered yet.

Stromboli - Danny Devito.

God - Bill Murray or Al Pacino.

Oh right, I forgot to wish everyone a happy tdov yesterday. please take my sincere (and belated) well-wishes.

I know the whole point of the game is that it's a dating Sim but like, is there an actual reason those eggs were fertilized or can Gingi just...do that on their own.

I genuinely need to know, curiousity is killing me. Also, I adore this silly game.

In? Nope.

You mentioned that characters such as Milt, Stabby/Shooty, and such others are from projects that were scrapped. If you’d want to, can you speak a bit more about what the projects would’ve entailed for each character? Or as many as you’d want- of course,

Stabby and Shooty were inspired by two hiveminded goons with some of their lines being directed lifted from an old script. At a point, they wind up getting forcibly separated by their Mingus-esque boss and superglue their hands together, which makes them inseparable but remarkably easy to beat up since they each only have one hand free + can no longer dodge attacks. They wound up being easily outmaneuvered and then killed at the start of the final act, due to their general ineptitude.

It's funny because I have script drafts showing them interacting but Roger's route gives a somewhat bad impression of what that's like outside of Olandy, as that's kind of a rare edge case due to the double date dynamic.

Sorta. They wind up getting closer after Norm's route due to Gingi's influence. They're kind of an odd couple when paired, as in Roger, you take the parts of Gingi/Oliver that Randy struggles with and then amp them up to 100. It's fair to say Roger likes Randy more than Randy likes Roger.

It's not to say that Randy dislikes Roger, but his timidness and existential insecurity obviously conflict with Roger's nature. Roger also constantly wants to talk about topics that scare Randy, like gnomes and centipedes. Randy sorta tolerates Roger, akin to when an old former street dog has their family adopt a tiny labrador puppy that wants to play WAY too much.