Wow. 
It sure has been a crazy ride, huh, Commanders?

I've been a fan of Mass Effect since around 2009, when I upgraded my phone and got a newfangled fancy XBOX360 along with it. One of the first games I got for it was Mass Effect. Popping that bad boy into the disc drive sort of broke my brain, really. Irreparably, in a way I'm sure many of you can understand.

None really captured my attention quite like the character of Joker though. Not before, nor since.
As a character, there was just something about him, the way he thumbed his nose at everyone and everything who told him he couldn't do what he dreamed to.  All his life he was overlooked, denied, and forced to work three times as hard just to be tolerated, let alone accepted. Man, I got that.
Boundlessly caring, dependable, ride-or-die just behind that defensive, somewhat crude shell protecting a gooey centre. Man, I got that, too.
Add the gravitas of his responsibility for what happened in the second game, and, yeah, sign me the hell up for that extremely satisfying narrative poetry. The fact that he was voiced by an actor whose work I greatly admire and appreciate didn't exactly sour it for me, either.

When ME3 was still in development I happened to be working at a tattoo studio, and in walked a guy who ended up being the lead of the character art department at BioWare. He saw my N7 tattoo I have on my wrist as I was fixing up his transfer and we got to chatting. Naturally, I had stars in my eyes and it was all very embarrassing in retrospect but, he was very kind to me and patient, and said he'd pass my request along. (Because of course I asked him. Why wouldn't I?) 
He gave me a few pointers as to things I should do if I wanted to work at BioWare and I used that information to get myself into University.

Imagine my disappointment when the game came out, my Shepard was talking to him in Flux Bar and then... Oh my God, the prompt came up! The prompt! I couldn't believe it! There it was, after eons of waiting, and then the subsequent two minutes were so devastating that I retired to writing fanfiction and drawing fanart for the next decade. Well, in amongst doing other things. I do have a life, you know. Somewhere. Anyway.

I manned the Joker fangroup on DeviantArt, and was the last woman standing on the 'We Want a Joker Romance for ME3' Facebook fanpage, before I made the decision to shut it down in a fit of mild despondency sometime in 2018 or something.

Then, I think about a month later, someone left a comment on my big giant old fanfiction I'd written about the pairing; asking where I was, what had happened to the story, that they loved these characters so much and wanted me to finish it, and it kind of broke my heart. It was like looking into a mirror, sort of.
So I re-read the thing and found it impossibly horrible - I knew I could do better. So I rewrote it entirely. Then, with the characters' voices firmly in my head I got to wondering if it was possible to do... more, somehow.

I started this project in September 2020, before BioWare announced the Legendary Edition. I threw my whole being into learning everything I could to make this work. I scoured all three games' raw audio for things to combine and recontextualise. I made an animatic proof-of-concept using only in-game lines spliced together and drawings on my iPad. I investigated weird-ass AI systems, I learned the intricate ins and outs of the lipsync system so I could (and had to) animate things for it completely blind. Up until about four months ago, I had to animate each one of these voice lines entirely by hand. Now, it's only half by hand. The only way to see the results is to run the game. Testing took an age. It took me an entire day to animate maybe 20 seconds' worth of dialogue, and that's if things were going well, which they often weren't. Fortunately, I have done my time in the QA mines and I am impervious to repetitive and frustrating tasks. When I want something done, I get it done.

The real challenge in all this was getting the voices to sound... Mmm, passable. I'm sure I can be forgiven for having neither Jennifer Hale nor Seth Green on speed-dial. He's not even on Cameo - I looked. Or, rather, I had some friends look. I was too busy crawling up my own backside at the thought of bothering either of these very busy people with this. I'm a penniless weirdo artist with no professional pedigree, I can't pay either of them what they're worth.

AI synthesized speech is a nascent technology with a lot of philosophical and moral issues surrounding it that that are equal parts fascinating and terrifying. I'm very certain that projects like mine will not have a place in the future, or at least, will be very strictly controlled - and that, by and large, is a good thing, I think. But, for my purposes right now, using this tech to create art is all I'm going to busy myself with. I'll leave the other stuff to brains bigger than mine. I hope everyone understands me here - I justified this being okay because it doesn't take any work away from anybody. It's not for profit, and it was never going to happen in canon. The games have been out for over a decade, the opportunity to add new plot things in was decided against for LE, and I am fairly certain that Mass Effect has moved beyond these characters now, as much as it tears my heart out to say it. 
Just putting it out there, BioWare: If Shepard's a protagonist, I want Joker to be their boyfriend, okay, I'm just saying, I'll buy six copies if you do, I'm just saying, I'll write it for you for free if you do, I'm just sa


So anyways, there's limitations to my project that I'm only too aware of.
Firstly, some parts are weaker than others. This entire thing is extremely complex. It's a plane that I not only learned how to fly it whilst building it, but learned how to build whilst building it.
The synths themselves got upgraded several times over the course of this project, and I got better at "playing" them, too. I replaced weaker lines with better takes as I progressed, but each new take required animating all over again. Eventually, I resolved that the priority had to be to get the thing out the door, or risk it being Jeff Nukem Forever. Some lines are much weaker than others; I know. Each line you hear in this game is literal hours of work, in writing, splicing, generating, and animating. They are the best that I could make them.

Narratively, it's a bit linear.
I know... I had so many things that have gone on the cutting room floor and some of them can be put into LE. The only reason some of them weren't in this is because of technical limitations -- some recent breakthroughs in audio implementation for LE mean a lot more is possible. Not so with the original game, I'm afraid.

I have tested this as well as I can but I may have missed some things. If I have, please be kind and point them out. If I can, I'll address them, or include them as fixes for the LE port... which is coming.

I'm one person.

Anyways... 
I hope you enjoy what I've made. I hope if you're as big a fan of the character as I am, that I've hit the right notes for you... and if you're new to appreciating the ballcapp'd one, I hope you can see some of what I see in the two of them, through my work.

With all the love in my heart, I am now going to sleep for a week, or maybe a month, I'd really love a cup of coffee,
- Jay