One of the things I love most about Iron Kingdoms Unleashed is how crazy and hilarious the game can be, but we decided to get serious while creating our Unleashed cartoon promos. These are the first videos we’ve made that allow you to actually hear the speech of different races from the wilds of Immoren, and we knew it would be important to create a distinct sound for each language.

To do it right would require painstaking research—hours of reviewing nature documentary footage, poring over piles of linguistics documentation, and interviewing serious animal-science guys. Then, we would be able to use our new knowledge to create perfect evolutionary languages for the wild races of Immoren.

Instead, Creative Director Ed Bourelle and I sat around drinking coffee and making funny voices until one of us started giggling like children. We failed at serious, so we fell back on making them crazy and hilarious, having each character voiced by Ed.

Longchops the gatorman monster hunter was the easiest. A walking, talking gator would probably have a low, mumbling growl. At one point in the “Helping Hands” episode he has his mouth full, so of course, Ed had to shove his own hand in his mouth to talk like a gator. Picture it in your mind, if you will.

As a Bog Trog, we thought Lurk the Bone Grinder would sound squishy like a fish, so we had Ed pinch and waggle his cheeks back and forth rapidly while he gave voice to Lurk’s gibberish. Again, picture it in your mind—and also picture me laughing so hard I was ruining Ed’s takes.

The unanimous favorite was Ed’s idea for Gullin’s trollkin language: a near-monotone, rapid recitation of the names of various hip-hop artists. Have fun identifying them all.

In addition to the silliness making up the characters’ speech, there was a lot of good-natured groaning and eye-rolling as we all brainstormed the initial joke and punchline ideas. We also had a blast creating the goofy drawings and animations.

We will never hear banjo music the same way again.

Happy gaming!