[Background Blog] Lin & Partners The Story So Far Trailer

Since most of you wanted us to talk a bit about Lin & Partners we wanted to share a bit about the development behind one of the trailers we released over the past few weeks of the campaign.

So, as some of you may already know, the initial planned announcement for Lin & Partners was back in 2018 after our teaser website went up. Back then we were planning to just announce the project with the trailer you see above. As such, the production of this trailer happened mid-late 2018.

Starting Out

At this time, the main scenario and layout for the game was already planned. So a layout powerpoint document for this trailer was put together to get an idea of what we wanted to make.

Here's a few snippets from this presentation document. (The full 22 pages may be a bit much to post here after all) You can already tell a few details about the game have changed since back then. Since the game was still 2D we were looking more at mobile than console platforms at the time. 

Then the process split into three: artwork, voice over, and music.

Artwork

At this point we started working with the artist for the trailer (Yi-Shu who has her comic, Werewolf in the K-9 Squad published by Pawprint Press) who's illustration style we thought would work well with the comic art direction of the trailer.

(Patrons with access to background artwork rewards will get to see more of the drafts and final artworks along with this update)

Voice Over

So previously we had dubbed Nekojishi in Chinese for the voice pack DLC that was released earlier in 2018. As a part of releasing this, we found that our feedback was mostly that people either didn't want CH voice over or they found the accents, or lack of accents distracting. At the same time most of our international audience was asking for either Japanese or English voices and we had a lot of offers from fans coming in to do voice work. This is when we decided to make the push for English VA for Lin & Partners.

We realised wouldn't be satisfied with the quality if we didn't seek our professional actors for the cast (as we had done the majority of the characters in the Chinese voice pack) so that's when we remembered a certain voice talent who had reached out to us earlier in 2017, Sean Chiplock. We got back in touch, and he was happy to work with us for the trailer. (He's been so great to work with these past few years!)

At this point we had two roles to fill for the trailer, Liao (Sean Chiplock) and the reporter you hear at the start. (Danielle McRae) Above you can see the character breakdowns we provided to the actors.

Because of the small scale of this project, obviously we couldn't do a proper studio recording, but we worked with both actors remotely; Danielle providing her lines directly, and Sean doing a remote recording session with us over Discord.  

Above you can see some of the script that was written based on the points in the layout document mentioned at the start of this post. In total we recorded just over 60 lines with a few difference voice styles for Liao. You may also notice a whole bunch of lines that were cut out of the trailer to make it shorter and more to the point. (It was closer to 7 minutes before the trim, so we may share the early draft of the trailer from 2018 at some point since we think people may find it interesting) From there it was mostly audio editing to select the best takes for each line, and putting the trailer together around the VA. We hope you enjoy how the final product turned out! 

Music

The last part of the production of this trailer was the music which was written by Rhett Lee around the same time he was working on the tracks for Beek - Familiar Spirit. Some of the main directions for the track was music from Lupin the Third, The Sims, and others, with the direction of a piano and light jazz style. From this came the jazzy slant-remix of A Sunny Day is Watching Over You that you hear in the current trailer, although not exactly in the same form you hear today.

The first versions of the track were fully sample based, which in most cases is usually great with high quality samples but we decided it felt that some quality was missing as a jazz track. When we had the opportunity to work on this more when the game announcement was pushed back to focus on designing the gameplay, we decided to look to filling in some of the instruments with live recording.

After trying a few options, we eventually settled on working with a jazz band who's local to our project lead in Australia, The Consouls. (The Consouls are a band who does jazz covers of video game music and their work is awesome so do check them out.) It took us a few months to schedule this, but we managed to organise them to do a studio recording of the track back in June/July 2019. We'll be uploading the clean version of this track to our YouTube soon so be sure to look forward to hearing it in full.

Release

At this point it's early 2020 and the announcement of Nekojishi: Lin & Partners was nearly upon us, and only then were we putting the final edits together on this trailer. (Which in the end was still completed a few weeks before the announcement trailer at least)

While we did have some pushback on the artwork, we think it came out pretty good and most people seem to like it, so we hope it helps people get excited for Lin & Partners and work as a good introduction for people who didn't play the original game.

And that's it for the blog today, we hope you all found this look into the production of this trailer interesting. We'll be sure to be back with some more content soon enough!