Introducing Ingvild Deila - Voice of Tove

Over the last few weeks we’ve been talking a great deal about the audio aspects of Röki and our approach to bringing the game to life with sound. It’s always been our aim to create a modern adventure game with a strong emotional core and it’s felt like we’ve made some pretty big jumps towards that goal over the last couple of months.

As we were at the later stages of developing our ‘Emote Library’ system (our solution utilising audio to bring our characters to life and convey emotion to the player - if you missed those blog-posts you can catch up here and here) we knew that we were soon going to have to tackle the very difficult task of finding the right person to play our hero, Tove.

Tove is the game’s emotional core and central to Röki’s story, and we knew it was going to be very challenging for us to find the right actress for a role that was so central to our game. It was important that we cast a Scandinavian actress with great emotion range, who could be quite subtle and understated but still connect and convey emotion to the player.

We knew this was quite a big ask.

It was a very big deal for us and we didn’t want to get this wrong. We put such importance on the casting of Tove that we concentrated all our casting efforts around her character, knowing that she would be the linchpin around which all other casting decisions would be made. (She also has by far the most screen time as well!)

Introducing Ingvild

Suffice to say we are grinning ear-to-ear to be able to announce that Ingvild Deila has taken on the role of Tove in Röki.

Ingvild is a multi-talented Norwegian actress, singer, writer and philomath who played Princess Leia in Rogue One as well as having a small role in Avengers: Age of Ultron. She also has played the female lead in the following feature films:Hippopotamus (2016 dir. Ed Palmer), Escape from Brazil (dir. Bruno Decc 2018) and will play the lead in The OOPArt (dir. Bruno Decc 2019) and Hills (dir . Oscar Forshaw Swift 2019) . Her next role is in Gregory Kirchhoff ’s Baumbacher Syndrome, playing opposite Tobias Moretti.

Here’s a video showcasing some of her work and you can find some more info on her current film project, the OOPArt via it’s Patreon page here.

As you also may have noticed in her bio Ingvild is also a singer.

When we found this out our ears pricked up, when we then heard some recordings of her singing we got super excited. Suffice to say this is a talent we’re looking at incorporating into Röki.

Impact

Last month, we had a remote Röki recording session with Ingvild which was a lot of fun and very exciting. Throughout the session we (Tom, Ali and I) were all hit by what a big difference this was going to make and taken a back by Ingvild’s performance as we were hearing Tove come to life for the first time.

Ingvild’s raw recordings (we still need to do some processing) have already made it into the game and have made an instant impact on the emotional connection to the characters, how the game feels and feedback to the player.

Welcome Ingvild!

As we said at the start of this post, casting Tove was always going to be a difficult task for us, and one that we were quite nervous about. The outcome has been more than we could have hoped for.

Please join us in welcoming Ingvild to Team Röki!

Until next time,

Alex & Tom