Highly Likely the game. We ask you for help / advice.

Greetings to everyone reading this message!

First, let us introduce ourselves, as well as the essence of the matter.

We are a small but extremely ambitious development team, Mikola Zaporozhsky Games.

For almost a year now we have been working on a project called Highly Likely. Is a surreal 2D Adventure about a funny and somewhat naive character called Mikola who is trying to do all he can to save his homestead. This is the first part of the trilogy, the release of which is scheduled for the end of 2019.

With the upcoming release we are very seriously confronted with the problem of localizing the game into English, and specifically choosing the narrator’s voiceover.

Why did we decide to ask your advice?

The reason is that our game has a fascinating, rich storyline, it features a storyteller who throughout the game narrates all the events behind the scenes, conveys the thoughts of the characters, and conducts dialogs on behalf of the characters so that players can fully enjoy the game, get into its spirit, and also could emotionally empathize with the main character.

By the way, there is a lot of text in the game, for example, in the Russian version of the game, the total time of the voiceover was 1 hour and 53 minutes (56933 characters or 10613 words). This time is calculated based on the assumption that all the text goes as a stream, without pauses. In the game itself, the text will be natural, with pauses, somewhere more, somewhere fever.

We work on the project putting a lot of ourselves into it and approach every decision with great responsibility. We really want you, the players, to enjoy the game and appreciate it. That is why we decided not to make this decision before consulting with the players, so we ask you: Whose voice would you like to hear as the narrator?

Now we have a video backstory in which we used the voice of an actor we found on a freelance website. But we would like to offer you the best possible experience!

For example, for the role of the Russian narrator we invited the master of the Russian voice-acting Andrei Yaroslavtsev. He is very famous in the Russian-speaking community, he is the voice of Optimus Prime (Transformers), Zoltan Chivay (The Witcher 3), Gimli (The Lord of the Rings), the narrator in Valiant Hearts, etc. In our opinion, the participation of Andrei Yaroslavtsev certainly enriched the game and gave it a peculiar style and fairy tale charm.

We would like to achieve exactly the same effect for the English version, so that the narration would fascinate the player from the first seconds and make the story feel like a good fairy tale.

If you have any ideas, please write in the comments which actors (maybe not among the most famous ones) would you recommend us to invite to the project for the role of the narrator.

Let me talk a little about our project.

If we were to describe our game in a few words, they would be Ukraine, Oil, freebies and stereotypes!

Yes, these are the definitions given by people who see our game for the first time. We don’t deny it, it's true! The game is built on these stereotypes, in the best sense, and therefore is interesting and exciting!

Highly Likely is a surreal 2D Adventure about a funny and somewhat naive character called Mikola who is trying to do all he can to save his homestead.

The story unfolds in a most ordinary Ukrainian farmstead near the Polish border, where the main character, Mikola, lives with his wife. In pursuit of his dream, he lands in tough circumstances and finds himself facing the threat of total ruin. It would seem that this is the end for Mikola, he's finished, but fate offers him a second, albeit rather dangerous, chance. Mikola decides to take it without any hesitation and undertakes a risky activity that draws him into incredibly exciting, sometimes dangerous, and unpredictable adventures.

The tragicomic storyline, which engenders empathy for the main character, together with the outstanding graphics and variety of quests will keep you hooked until the very end.

The game features the cartoonish style similar to Valiant Hearts.

We plan to release two sequels to the game. In the very near future, the first part of the trilogy will be fully ready for launch.

Thank you for being with us!

Sincirely,
Mikola Zaporozhsky Games team