The two then assembled friends and close collaborators and hastily got to work. Grey and Shaw then pitched the idea to their friends at Game Grumps, and the developer happily approved the project. “It was such an interesting idea that we spent the rest of the day spying on dads in Disneyland to form the sort of archetypes we wanted to work with.”
“Leighton and I were on our way to Disneyland when she pitched me the idea of a dating simulator where you play as a dad and your goal is to meet and romance other hot dads,” Shaw says. We wanted to make something that was light, fun and allowed these characters to exist as themselves in a really idealized version of the world.”įittingly, this idealized world-and all seven of its daddies-were dreamed up in a single day during a visit to the happiest place on earth. “And not where the gay characters are seen for two seconds or die immediately or their only personality trait is a reductive view of their sexuality. “I know firsthand how badly we all just want to see ourselves and our experiences reflected in media,” Grey says. Rather, they envisioned a dating simulator “made for anyone who wants to kiss hot dads.” But as they continued working on the project, they saw an opportunity to write a unique queer story in a way that hadn’t been done before. “The ambiguity of the player’s gender identity, the player’s comfort level with sex and the player’s age were all things we wanted to leave as open-ended as possible, giving players the opportunity to explore the sexuality of the game on their own terms,” Grey says.Īt the beginning, Grey and co-creator Vernon Shaw didn’t intend for Dream Daddy to be a queer game at all. The magic of Dream Daddy is that it presents significant details as insignificant, which allows players the space to interpret a story the way they choose. We had so much fun writing him and yet, statistically, he’s the least popular dad. “A story doesn’t work without conflict, and a trope that I’ve always found funny is the weird one-upmanship that can happen between dads. “We initially wrote entire path being a real sweetie pie, and as it turned out, it was extremely, extremely boring,” Leighton Grey, one of Dream Daddy’s creators, tells Xtra. And although I had no way of knowing for sure, he looked like a loud chewer-and I hate loud chewers. Everything is a competition, including the fish he strong-armed me to catch on this so-called date.
Next, and far more irritating, he is a consummate one-upper. To start, he took me fishing, and I hate fishing. Of the seven impossibly delectable daddies––from “cool dad” Mat to “goth dad” Damien––Brian most reflected the men I date IRL, and I knew in my heart that he was the man for me. I played Dream Daddy dead set on marrying Brian, the husky outdoorsman with kind eyes and ginger hair.