Feeling seen: Handling marginalised representation in Usual June
Again in 2020, Finji CEO Rebekah Saltsman and artistic director Adam Saltsman had been determining the best way to follow-up Overland. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, that recreation is a far cry from what the duo set their sights on subsequent – the ghostly supernatural vibes of Usual June.
“We knew that whatever we did next, we wanted to do it together,” Saltsman tells GamesIndustry.biz. “We wanted a main character, we wanted to do something more action based, and we wanted to tell a story that we both really cared about.”
That story follows the titular character June, who is much from traditional. For one, she will be able to speak to ghosts, and he or she makes use of this skill to help her investigation into the city of Fen Harbor and combat supernatural creatures throughout a number of dimensions.
Nonetheless, at its coronary heart Usual June is about championing marginalised folks and their tales. For Saltsman, it was vital for marginalised gamers to kind a reference to the sport and see themselves mirrored in its characters.
Finji CEO Rebekah Saltsman
“It is pretty once you see a trailer for a recreation, particularly should you’re somebody who’s much less represented in video games, and assume: ‘Any individual sees me.’ There’s somebody who sees me as an individual who got here to motion video games late. However somebody additionally sees anyone like my husband who’s obsessive about Darkish Souls and Elden Ring.
“With Usual June, there’s a low floor for people like me who aren’t particularly good at action games, but are totally there for it so you can style your way through the game.”
Saltsman explains that because of this it was vital to offer the required instruments to gamers with totally different ability units, together with particular skills.
Dashing makes you invulnerable for a time period, whereas one other slows time in battle but additionally once you open menus “to ensure you’re able to have the option to access the things that you need to do.”
“Players have a lot of tools at their disposal,” she says. “You get to go through these sequences with the tools that you’re comfortable and familiar with. If you want to learn how to use them, we give you the opportunity to gradually add them.
“It’s really important to me that the game is inviting. Really high level players are getting good experience, but then people who want to play so badly aren’t going to be tossed out of it because they’re not good enough. There is a pathway through that is fun and we’re going to teach you bit by bit as you go, so you can feel confident using the extra tools.”
Saltsman provides: “More advanced players may think, ‘Oh, this is really easy.’ Not that Usual June is easy, but it feels really natural. For newer players, we give you the space to learn, which is us wanting more people to play games.”
One other technique to appeal to gamers to Usual June was by utilising acquainted genres.
“Each Adam and I really like style movies, so we wished to stroll that edge between true horror and actually good tales. And in numerous instances, regular, unusual folks put in extraordinary circumstances with their mates. We love media like that, and it is not likely represented nicely in video games. And once you begin including extra various voices into video games, you find yourself with extra various tales.
“The game isn’t operating in a space that people are unfamiliar with. And then I think to myself, ‘Well, why is no one doing games in this space? That’s weird, because these stories are great’.”
Throughout improvement, the crew seemed to media they had been followers of that match these genres. Usual June attracts inspiration from TV reveals like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars, in addition to video games resembling Bayonetta and Management. Saltsman additionally mentions the Spider-Verse movies as a significant affect for the sport’s total artwork model.
Nevertheless it was the Netflix sequence I am Not Okay With This that offered essentially the most inspiration. The present follows a teen navigating her day-to-day life as she offers with having superpowers.
“We watched that show and were like, ‘This feels like if Mae from Night in the Woods had powers’,” Saltsman exclaims. “We were already making [Usual June] at this point, but thought: ‘Oh, that’s a really cool touch point’.”
“When you start adding more diverse voices into games, you end up with more diverse stories”
As for setting, Usual June takes place in a city primarily based on the Midwest American cities that Saltsman and the crew had been acquainted with.
“They’re weird places full of cool people with weird old stories and their own urban legends,” she smiles. “The United States is a big place, and we often only hear stories about coastal locations rather than those interior places where so many of us actually grew up.”
Saltsman notes that modelling the buildings on these discovered in these locations added to the crew’s storytelling capabilities.
“These locations are intentionally built to look like these old American towns that were established in the 1800s, but the buildings have turned into twenty other things since,” she explains.
“You might visit my city of Grand Rapids, for example, and walk into a coffee shop and you can tell it used to be a factory, then it might have been a dentist office at some point. All of that [history] is just there.
“So when you start ripping out walls, you’re left wondering… ‘Are those teeth in there? When was this a dentist office, and for how long? Does it have ghosts, too?’ That was part of the early foundational levels of the art direction in Usual June, especially the human places.”
These spooky areas communicate for themselves, and are intertwined with the general story which is instructed by way of massive narrative sections.
“We have big narrative and investigative sections in the Earth realm, while in the other space June can access there are narrative fragments as you play through the action sequences,” Saltsman explains, including that June will run into ghosts in this realm that turn into companions throughout these moments.
“They’re not necessarily fighting alongside you. Instead, they help you with the story and provide the context of what’s going on there. In general, the ghosts are able to aid and assist you by either giving you information or a piece of themselves to help you in combat.”
“It’s really important to me that the game is inviting”
For a recreation with numerous narrative, there is not any spoken dialogue. The characters produce sounds, however the dialogue is text-based. So why take this route?
“There’s a lot of reasons for this,” Saltsman explains. “One is personal preference, the other is that [recording] voice – especially for an indie team of our size – is so astronomically out of budget. You have to have the script done so early, then you’re moving into acting… The timing is crazy, the budgets are bananas. And even with a well funded team, it’s still very expensive.”
Saltsman says that utilizing Vocaloid, a voice synthesiser program, reasonably than spoken dialogue not solely added ambiance to the sport, it additionally helped distinguish between the totally different characters.
“It’s been a really big part of figuring out how to make these characters sound individual, and also how to follow the sentence structure,” she explains.
“If you’re asking a question, does it sound like a question? If the character is excited, if they’re whispering, if they’re yelling, how do you make that sound? It was a really tricky problem but Adam Hay is brilliant. He spent an incredible amount of time honing the sound – it sounds like nothing else.”