Behind The Scenes of Hear Say

CAW CAW! BAGOODA! WEESNAW! These are the noises I make when I play Hear Say. I would never be able to make these noises if it weren’t for the genius Jackbox Games developers behind the project.

These outside-the-box thinkers created a new game for Party Pack 11 where you use your real phone microphone to make real noises that are put into the real game! We recently spoke to the team about what went into making Hear Say.

You can play Hear Say and The Jackbox Party Pack 11 when it drops on all major consoles on October 23rd!

Please introduce yourself and your role on Hear Say.

Hi! I’m Alina Constantin, I was the game director for Hear Say.

I’m Bruno Rodríguez, and I worked on the art for Hear Say.

I’m Michael Siciliano, I programmed Hear Say.

I’m Avery Makel, I worked on the sound for Hear Say.

How did you come up with the idea for Hear Say?

Hear Say’s game idea started in Jackbox’s sound department. A group of sound designers and engineers prototyped a concept where players competed as foley artists, using microphone input to make silly sound effects for old movies. We built on that to go beyond literal dubbing and answer the question - how many different ways can we bring your sounds to life? -  Alina

Something the team added after the initial pitch was the intermission games (Ups & Downs, Nibble Noises, and Hup Hop). We did all this work to hook up microphones into the game and we really wanted to push what we could do with that beyond just recording words or sounds for a prompt. - Michael

Do you have any fun stories from making Hear Say?

Once people get comfortable recording, you get some spectacular nonsense.
When colleagues started to say that when they played, their pets were leaving the room or their partners checked in to see if they were ok, we knew we were getting there. 

One time we were testing out a music video idea, and got to hear each other belting insane lyrics we’d just made together. It wasn’t reliable enough to keep, but was a lot of fun - Alina

What makes the Hear Say dev team so special?

Everyone on the team is incredibly talented and dedicated to their work. Every detail of this game is meticulously crafted, tested and vetted on repeat; whether it’s camera motion, the impact of tied scores, the dynamic linework of an animated character, the exact audio range your phone is picking up and playing back, the exact sound effect or adjective to help players performances be fun, varied, and the joke land twice, amplified onto the exact split second off a patchwork of corporate footage that was definitely filmed with something else in mind… It’s very intentional and elaborate work to make something feel beautifully stupid at its best - Alina

There are no big egos, everyone offers their take on things but we respect each other a lot. I really enjoy what everyone worked on, from the hilarious prompts and videos that Paris [Newton, Hear Say’s Editorial Lead,] and Alina wrote and curated to the cool tech stuff Chase [McClure] and Michael worked on for the controller and the game respectively. Avery [Makel, Hear Say’s Audio Lead,] made some incredible music, and Dutch [Freese, our QA Lead’s,] playtesting of the game was thoughtful and his recorded sounds were all winners. I think we just had a really good combination of folks for Hear Say and we had fun making the game. - Bruno

What was one challenge you had to overcome during production?

One of the hardest nuts to crack were the final round clips. We wanted them to be a fun video backdrop for the player's individual sounds to make sense coming together, be surprising even as they’d already been replayed, yet still feel like their own. From old movie scenes to original trailers or commercial shorts, we tried a lot of things. We needed to build a modular film editing pipeline from scratch on top of a game relying on the nuances of microphone input, both of which we hadn’t done before. Landing on little bite sized narratives with the right mix of surreal and relatable took curation with a lot of iteration between 3 different departments. - Alina

I wanted the environment to feel more immersive, like entering a mysterious tunnel inside a TV. We’ve done similar things before with video but I wanted to make it more dynamic and lively so I asked Michael (our gameplay engineer) to help me make it real. We made a series of randomized panels that cycle through back and forth creating the illusion of motion in three dimensions. It took some elbow grease to make it work but we did! - Bruno

The infinitely-zooming panels might just be the most difficult set of animations I’ve worked on. Lots of considerations with aesthetics but also with performance. They look really good though! - Michael

What were you inspired by while designing the look and music for Hear Say?

We knew we’d be combining very different kinds of media between different player sound performance to different visual sources. A visual and sound personality that could both unify and harmonize it, while always spotlighting our players was important to me. Things like the 90s MTV idents were a nice inspiration for our tv world and how we framed things together - Alina

The main inspiration for the art was poster design from the 60s and 70s. Specifically Cuban movie posters, or American designers like Milton Glaser. They had this loose and playful feel to them. I think a reaction to more traditional realistic illustrations from the time that people would have seen everywhere. I also looked at odd musical instruments and devices as well as sciency visual representations of waveforms. - Bruno

What is your favorite part of Hear Say? 

So much of it brings up joy in different ways that it’s really hard to say. I’m proudest of the final round because it felt like the biggest challenge. But right now after spending months on hundreds of video files, my favorite parts to watch and play are the lobby and the blooper reel, the bookends outside the game. People making conversation in unexpected ways through the game; rerecording avatar sounds responding to each other, then nagging or highlighting each other with particular replays of their performances at the end, that really makes me happy - Alina

Art-wise maybe the game font, called Meltaface. It was the first time I tried creating a complete font and it was a somewhat difficult but rewarding process. I’m happy with the end result and I think it fits the game well, sometimes it is hard to find an existing font that does that. 
Here are some fun hidden symbols I made for the font. - Bruno

Any fun glitches or unexpected gameplay moments that happened during production and testing?

One time we had a playtester dive face first into a bean bag so others wouldn’t hear him recording. Another time at a DePaul campus playtest, one of the students recorded hiding behind a projector screen. A friend recorded their cat’s sounds, and stole a round with just that. Then there was that bug when I was trying to trigger specific prompts and got stuck staring into the beauty of our endlessly looping tunnel instead. - Alina

Just recently we finished a playtest and were trying to get notes on the prompts people saw. But any time someone tried giving their feedback, players would play a blooper video of an explosion with the sound of a wet fart. We never got to the notes. - Michael

What has been your favorite memory of making Hear Say?

My favorite memory is seeing one of our senior producers muted on camera, making silly faces and secret hand gestures with his son to record sounds together, and win the game. Having someone who’d actively participated since our earliest tests stating he knew he’d never be good at it, now be celebrated in-game while sharing this personal moment with his family and the team…absolutely golden. - Alina

Playing the game during our PAX West panel with a huge audience all playing the intermission games. Absolute pandemonium. - Michael

Wishlist Hear Say now so you don’t miss it when it drops on October 23rd!