The making of... Kasio

One of our earliest concept sketches of Kasio alongside a finished piece!

Kasio was the first character we wrote, and everything came from her. In a lot of ways Kasio changed the least of all the characters. We learnt more and more about her as we wrote... particularly when the story started focusing on who she was and who her family was.

If Found... was always a story about her coming home. At first “home” was an invented island off the North West coast called “Inch”. Eventually Kasio’s home moved to the Achill Island you see in game, or… in County Mayo in real life. And specifically Dugort on Achill, between Keel & Keem.

Kasio's first name never changed but her last name took a while to figure out! For a while she was Kasio Lavelle (Shans got that name after Kasio abandoned it, because it's a long-standing Achill name with an interesting backstory and a nice sound.) From early on Liadh vetoed Kasio being an artist in case anyone thought it was her, so instead Kasio got increasingly into space & physics (not unlike Llaura oops).

At the start of development we were almost scared to look too closely at Kasio, and so she was a bit of a black box. It’s very difficult to write clearly about things you are experiencing and only in retrospect can you understand it. Another important issue for us, and why it took us long to include trans, we didn't want Kasio to struggle with her own identity. Some of the people around her in If Found... struggle with their own discomfort with who Kasio is, but she has a very clear sense of herself. We also knew that we didn't want her story to have a sad ending (there are enough sad gay stories out there already, thank you very much), but figuring out what Kasio's happy ending looked like took time and thought and effort. But the place we ended up in is one that I think we liked and also recognised from our own lives and the lives of the people we know.

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Find Kasio’s in-game conversation reactions here! You can use them as emojis on Discord and other platforms.