With The Jackbox Party Pack 11 set for release later this year across pretty much all formats, the team at Jackbox Games is slowly revealing the exciting games coming to the pack as the year goes on.
The latest game revealed is “Hear Say”, a game where “your voice is the star”. Having just been revealed, it seemed the perfect time to sit down and chat with Hear Say Creative Director, Alina Constantin, to talk about where the idea behind Hear Say came from, how the team’s pitch meetings work, the technology behind the game, and a lot more. So let’s get to it…
Hear Say sounds like great fun, where did the idea behind this game come from?
The idea for Hear Say came out of the exciting combo of our sound, controller and writing departments.
A few of our audio designers tested a “Foley artist game” over Discord last summer, muting and unmuting microphones then hacking people’s sound effects together with old movie footage collected for Fibbage 4.
It was incredibly goofy and exciting from the start. We’re always looking to add novelty to how folks use phones in our games, so looking for a range of satisfying things for players to do using microphones as input was key. It also tapped into something primal in how people have fun with media.
Most people will have played around with muting sound on a screen, making silly sound effects to it or watching someone else do it. It’s a whole other level to make that reliably fun and functional. A high level of craft came in finding the words to elicit all kinds of bizarre mouth sounds and phrases from different people, land the joke at the right time, and reveal sounds in new contexts. It’s a huge testament to our writers as well as our engineers and our artists that this audio game has taken shape the way it has.
How often does the team have “pitch meetings” for new games, and have you had any that haven’t made the cut (yet)?
At Jackbox, individuals and small teams will try out new ideas alongside the many tasks of wrapping up a party pack, and we’ll playtest a lot of concepts amongst ourselves. Depending on the time of year and ideas we’re getting internally or externally, we’ll hold at least 3 or 4 pitching cycles to decide which games go into production. In a given year, anything from a dozen to thirty ideas get prototyped. With 5 games in each pack, yes, there are many that don’t make the initial cut. But there are just as many that come back retooled and improved in future cycles!
Given the input method (phones), how tricky is it on a technical level to make this one work for all users, with so many devices out there?
The technical aspects of getting our input from phone microphones has its complexity, though maybe not the trickiness you’d expect. Most phone microphones provide decent audio, from which we collect samples up top and align each to a chosen baseline with other player devices. The challenge was less in the differences between devices, but more in filtering room sound for which noises we keep, and which we don’t.
Making sounds that could be misconstrued as noise is part of the game, so fancy tools ended up working against us. What we consider as noise isn’t the same as what algorithms in a denoizer plugin will consider as noise, which could cut out player audio or make silly mouth effects unintelligible. We eventually landed on a custom made approach, crafting our own filters rather than using ready-made tools.
Does the fact you can play Jackbox games on streams and involve audiences with a simple room code make the technical side extra complicated?
Having a single room code for streaming and large audiences to access our games is integral to our Party Packs and the system we continue to refine over the years. For Hear Say this works overall the same way as for our other games. Design and networking components are in place to allow us to poll and gate specific user data at regular intervals.
Essentially, we strategically select the information we send and receive across our servers and different user types. Streamers can access moderation options. Audience members are given simple choices in game moments where they can support player actions, like being involved in tiebreakers or swinging votes rather than interfering.
In cases where the game gives audiences access to a similar activity as active players, their actions and information can remain local to their device and avoid conflicts with the rest of the game.
Is there a family friendly option for Hear Say, and if so, how on earth does that work?
The majority, around 95% of Hear Say prompts and videos are family friendly. The few that involve innuendos or references that would appeal to a different audience are tagged and can be removed using our content settings, like in other games. We’ve played the game in our own families with children and adult audiences equally, screened broadly and reviewed for sensitivity. Some kids got close to peeing their pants laughing.
That aside, we’ve tested extensively to make the content accessible to as many as possible and it’s played very successfully for six and sixty year olds alike.
As with the rest of our games, we curate a stage and let players decide what parts to bring to the table. If groups chose to record sounds with strangers, moderation tools are in place to hear and vet submissions in advance of playing them back to the room. In other situations, we anticipate voting and room culture to come into play. It’s important for us to allow our player groups the freedom to express and regulate themselves.
With games like Tee-KO, you could get t-shirts printed of your ideas. Is there any way to save particularly brilliant ideas from Hear Say, and say, export them for sharing outside the game, easily?
We’re working on a system to allow individual players the option to download their own audio onto their device during a game session, and choose where they’d want to share it. With respect for personal consent, legal, as well as storage concerns, we will not be storing or delivering any player audio after a game session ends.
The tech makes the head spin with ideas, could Jackbox ever be tempted into using this kind of tech to make things like music creation tools?
Many things are possible. It’s common for us to build off of tools from earlier games and make entirely new gameplay out of them. Our focus is how we can reliably deliver on delightful, original social experiences for our players. What that will be, only time will tell.
How does player feedback inspire the team?
Player feedback is huge for us, whether during development or after a game’s release. Most of our game content is shaped in observing how people interact with our games and things that happen spontaneously during play.
Once a concept is on its feet, it goes through playtests at least once or twice a week. Player feedback to our released games informs our patches, as well as which new ideas that get built. We pay extra attention to when players express high emotions, whether it’s engagement, confusion, excitement, or connection with each other. We vet our gameplay and content against a variety of behaviors and personalities to ensure many can interact within it, even as each game has a core focus that may appeal to some more than others. We use player feedback to refine what each game is specifically good at allowing players to express together, and tune out any interferences to that core experience as we can.
What’s the future looking like for Jackbox Games, after Party Pack 11?
We’ll be focusing our work on Trivia Murder Party 3 and keeping everyone posted on the game’s progress throughout the year!
Thanks to Alina Constantin for taking the time to answer our questions. The Jackbox Party Pack 11 is coming in Fall 2025.
