Haven makes you play as Yu and Kay, a young couple who are not supposed to be together. While everything in the universe is trying to tear them apart, they keep fighting for the freedom to be in love.
In Haven’s first version of the game, Yu and Kay are a young man and women. But one of the key theme of Haven has always been about “being free to love who you want”. Initially, our game concept featured 8 couples, with some of them being gay and lesbian. It was a very natural and obvious way to go with such a theme.
But production constraints made us cut all these characters and refocus the story and the game over two characters only. This allowed us to craft a very unique and moving story about two persons in love. Two personalities, two lives tangled with each other that players would come to know and fall in love with during the game.
After Haven released last year, we took some time to work on a unique update that would better support the game’s theme: you can now choose to play the game with the lovers you want. Either a woman and a man, two women or two men.
This is a fantastic update that lets you play the game with the same couple, Yu and Kay, but offers you the choice for them to be two men or two women. Let’s make things clear though: this is not a new story arc and the new couples do not have gameplay specificities. This is “just” a way to allow more people to enjoy Haven in a way that represents them better. We are very proud to make Haven represent love in a broader way!
You might have noticed that Kay as a woman and Yu as a man look very similar to their opposed gender versions. There are two reasons for that: first they are the same characters in the story, they share the same backstory and life. And second, for technical reasons, we had to keep the same body size, hairstyle and body shape.
This update may seem like a small addition but it actually took us more than eight months of hard work. We had to design and create new 3D models, but also redraw all the 2D assets in the game the dialog portraits, the loading screens, the key illustrations, some contents in the endings… The only thing that wasn’t redone is the opening animation, which plays before the couple choice.
We also made sure the dialogs were correct with each couple. This means supporting new translations in all 8 languages (2 new translations, one if Kay is a woman and one if Yu is a man), as well as changing and recording some lines that had some kind of explicit or implicit gender in English (like if Yu says “Mister” to Kay… that doesn’t work with a woman anymore). And we re-recorded all the dialogs of the game with two new actors, Lexie Ann Kendrick and Ryan Highley.
When you make a game over many years of development, there’s always things that you wish you had done differently. Players sometimes ask us “why can’t I choose the gender of my characters in Haven?”, but at the time we could never have made that feature. Especially as it’s the story of Yu and Kay, unique characters crafted with strong intentions. But a year after the original release, we were able to make that very special addition to the game, and we hope many new players will be able to meet Yu and Kay ! (and Oink)
