Voice Attorney is a voice-controlled courtroom visual novel for the Google Nest Hub and Google Nest Hub Max. In the game, you use your voice to go through the evidence, question witnesses, and interrupt them by shouting “Objection!” to explain why their testimony doesn’t hold up. The entire game is played with voice only, and the story is fully voice-acted, creating a TV show–like experience. You are attorney Pax Cooper, defending your clients in four criminal cases; your competent partner at the law firm, Alex Perkins, will help you as you work with them to examine the evidence, interrogate witnesses, and reconstruct the case.

Voice Attorney won the award for Best Emergent Experience in the 2023 edition of Spilprisen.

As the game’s director and designer, I led the development of the game from concept to release, designing the whole game around Google’s unique Natural Language Understanding and Continuous Match technologies. In addition to designing all of the mechanics and the user experience, I worked closely with the story writer, Morten Brunbjerg, to structure the story and align it with the mechanics. I also worked with our in-house artists to develop a distinct visual style for the game, paying particular attention to how the images of the evidence aligned with the story and gameplay, as well as ensuring that our cast of characters is interesting and diverse.

As the game is fully voice-acted, I was very involved in the recording process, both when it came to casting the appropriate voice actors and during the recordings, in which I provided context and feedback on the line deliveries, taking into account the information that the player needs to understand and the effect of the dialogue on the story. I also managed the project, taking care of task tracking and prioritization throughout the 14-month development period, as well as handling communication with Google (as our publishers and technology owners) and Character Localization (in charge of the voice acting).

• Directed and designed a debut game that would go on to win the Spilprisen 2023 award for Best Emergent Experience, and which is considered by Google to be “one of the highest-quality and most loved experiences on the platform”
• Broke new ground in making a voice-controlled visual novel, giving players a new way to experience visual novels as one of the very first narrative-driven games on the Google Assistant platform
• Created completely novel game mechanics around emergent technologies, thanks to our beta access to Google’s Continuous Match voice technology
• Coordinated the efforts of the whole team from both a creative perspective and a project management perspective